HISTORICAL DISCOURSE BY JOHN WHITE 
CHADWICK, SUNDAY, APRIL FOURTEENTH, 
NINETEEN HUNDRED AND ONE, WITH 
OTHER SERVICES IN RECOGNITION OF 
THE FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF THE 
FIRST MEETING OF THE SECOND UNITA- 


RIAN SOCIETY, BROOKLYN, NEW YORK. 


“Our finest hope is finest memory.” 
—Ge0rGE ELiorT. 


PRINTED BY WILLIAM GREEN, 
324-330 PEARL STREET, NEW YORK. 
1901. 


Pamphlet Collection 
e Divinity School 


MORNING SERVICE. 


ORGAN VOLUNTARY: “Largo” (Xerxes).—Handel. 


INVOCATION: Cuorr, 


Everlasting Holy One! 

Many a well-beloved son 

Thou dost choose, like Him of old, 
For Thy truth’s sake to be bold. 
Not by any outward sign 

Dost Thou show Thy will divine; 
Deep within Thy voice doth cry, 
And our spirits make reply. 


Lo! we stand before Thee now, 
And the silent, inward vow 
Thou hast heard in that profound 
Where is neither voice nor sound; 
Thou hast heard, and Thou wilt bless 
With Thy might and tenderness; 
We have come to do Thy will; 
With Thy love our spirits fill. 
—John W. Chadweck. 


INTRODUCTORY SENTENCES. 


HYMN. Tune: Missionary Chant. 


O Life that maketh all things new— 

The blooming earth, the thoughts of men! 
Our pilgrim feet, wet with Thy dew, 

In gladness hither turn again. 


From hand to hand the greeting flows, 
From eye to eye the signals run, 

From heart to heart the bright hope glows; 
The seekers of the Light are one. 


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One in the freedom of the Truth, 
One in the joy of paths untrod, 

One in the soul’s perennial youth, 
One in the larger thought of God ;— 


The freer step, the fuller breath, 
The wide horizon’s grander view, 
The sense of life that knows no death, 
The Life that maketh all things new. 
—Samuel Longfellow. 


READING OF THE SCRIPTURES. 
CHOIR: ‘' Praise Ye the Father.”—Gounod. 


PRAYER. 


HYMN. Tune: Prayer. 


(Written for our Twenty-fifth Anniversary.) 


We sowed a seed in faith and hope 
Out in the unfenced lands. 

Now, rooted deep and spreading fair, 
A living tree it stands. 

Nor strife nor cry has marred its growth, 
But, broadening silently, 

Each bough that sways in sunshine says: 
‘‘The Truth shall make you free!” 


Its leaves have for our healing been, 
By dews of heaven blest; 

Beneath its boughs our children sang, 
Our dear ones passed to rest. 

We in its shade with God have walked, 
Whom our own hearts could see, 

And lo! from need of rite or creed 
His Truth has made us free. 


From outward rule to inner law 
That Truth our feet still lead! 
From letter into spirit still, 
From form to life and deed! 
From God afar to God most near! 
Our confidence is He; 
From fear of man or church’s ban 
His Truth has made us free. 
—Samuel Longfellow. 


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HISTORICAL DISCOURSE. 


Ir has been plausibly maintained by some of the geologists 
that America is the older continent, but, thought of in the 
terms of civilization and enlightenment, nothing upon the con- 
tinent is very old. It is but little more than four centuries 
since Columbus, unaware of what had happened, touched our 
shores, not half the time since Oxford entered on her millen- 
nial career and Alfred made a brave beginning for that Eng- 
land who is the mother of us all. There are Unitarian 
churches in America which are venerable as measured by the 
standards of our American history; the oldest that of the Pil- 
grim Fathers, 1620; the First Church in Salem, 1629; the 
First Church in Boston, 1630; but these churches have not 
this age as Unitarian churches. They were originally Cal- 
vinistic, and did not become Unitarian till a century ago and 
less. It is the Congregational organization and not the Uni- 
tarian faith that has the venerable date. The first church 
organized in America as Unitarian was that of Philadelphia 
in 1796. The first church to become Unitarian was King’s 
Chapel, Boston, 1785. The next was even more distin- 
guished, the Church of the Pilgrim Fathers, at the century’s 
turn. This was the first New England Congregational church 
to hang out the Unitarian banner. Of the old Puritan churches 
we have, or had a few years ago, 120 on our Unitarian list. 

The first Unitarian church in this vicinity, organized as 
such, is also the first Congregational church in New York, 
that of All Souls. Our Brooklyn beginnings were in the 
thirties. In all strictness the Church of the Saviour is the 
second Unitarian church in Brooklyn. It was chartered as 
such, but in 1842 its charter, as well as that of the original 
First Church, was abandoned and a new First Church was 


5 


duly incorporated. Consequently, our mother church was 
only nine years old when we were born. ‘‘ Where everything 
is new, and our own is of the newest, no savour of antiquity 
must be expected in the feast prepared.” I said this twenty- 
five years ago, but since then so many Unitarian churches 
have sprung up that ours is now one of the most immemorial. 
Yet, somehow—I do not know exactly how—the fifty years 
now past seem less extended than did the twenty-five in 1876; 
perhaps because then I was still young, and now am getting 
old, and all the years seem shorter than they did. Perhaps, 
too, because since then we have had many centennial anni- 
versaries, and any historical period less than a century in 
length seems less important than it did. 

In 1876 I recited the life-history of our Society and, if I 
would not falsify that history, I am obliged to repeat many 
of the details which were embodied in my Twenty-fifth An- 
niversary discourse. To invent others for the sake of an 
agreeable variety would be quite improper. Moreover, some 
of you have forgotten those details, and others have joined 
themselves to our assembly since our former celebration. All 
beginnings fluctuate around different points, and the dates for- 
mally agreed upon are generally more or less arbitrary. Some, 
no doubt, would say that we should reckon our lifetime from 
November 5, 1850, when there was a meeting at the Brooklyn 
Institute ‘‘of persons in favor of the formation of a second 
Unitarian Society in Brooklyn.” Charles M. Olcott, father of 
George M. Olcott, one of the later presidents of our trustees, 
was chairman of this meeting, and the secretary was Benjamin 
F. Seaver, father and namesake of our present secretary, two 
out of many examples of a continuity which has run the old 
and new together in one sacred stream. The need of a second 
society was urged upon the ground that since the formation 
of the first the population of the city had nearly doubled and 
was nearly 100,000. When the secretary writes that Dr. Far- 
ley and several leading members of his church ‘‘had been 
consulted before proceeding to azy action whatever, and had 
ail warmly approved the movement,” the record seems too 
flattering to those concerned, but it is certain that no bad 
blood in this case, as in many others, furnished the seed of the 
new church. Something less than perfect satisfaction there 

6 


was no doubt with ‘‘the sincere milk of the Word” which Dr. 
Farley measured out. To-day there is not a single person 
connected with our Society who was present at that meeting 
of thirty-four persons, and the only survivor is, I think, Mr. 
John C. Beale. In and between the lines of Mr. Seaver’s rec- 
ord of the meeting we easily discern the leading spirits. One 
of them was E. S. Mills, another was Hamlin Blake, father of 
my friend, James Vila Blake, one of the most gifted of our 
Unitarian ministers, his gifts unique as they are beautiful. 
One thing to notice about this meeting and the general move- 
ment is that there is not a sign of any disposition to encourage 
a less conservative Unitarianism than that of the First Church. 
A call was extended to Dr. A. P. Peabody, then preaching at 
Portsmouth, N. H. Later his connection with Harvard Uni- 
versity brought him an enviable and tender fame. In 1850, 
as later, he was one of the most conservative of Unitarian 
preachers, and, if he had come when called, this might have 
been the banner church of Unitarian conservatism. 

But he did not come, though the committee sent to 
him was armed to the teeth with letters from Drs. 
Farley, Bellows, Gannett and others. ‘‘I do not be- 
lieve,” wrote Dr. Bellows, ‘‘that a Unitarian Society 
was ever started in our country with as strong a 
root as this. When before have we heard of fifty families 
starting up at once ready to claim a place among the most 
vigorous and important societies?” November 18 there was a 
meeting to hear Dr. Peabody’s unwelcome letter, saying that 
he could not come. Thecommittee kept up its urgency 
through the winter, but without avail. There was a third 
meeting, to hear its report, March 26, 1851. Mr. Reuben 
Daniell, who is with us and of us still, but prevented by 
broken health from joining in this commemoration, was 
present at this meeting. A first religious service was ap- 
pointed for April 2oth. With that genial optimism which is 
so characteristic of religious initiative, the expenses of the 
Society for the first year were estimated at $2,000, and were 
$3,300. A committee of twelve held various meetings, and 
the din of preparation was immense. What to do about the 
music was then, as sometimes since, a very serious question. 
A quartette calling themselves the Alleghanians was finally 


7 


engaged, and its secular and festive title was adumbrated by 
the assurance that its component parts were members of the 
Sacred Music Society. But this assurance was not enough 
for Judge Greenwood, who had agreed to play the organ, and 
he made a masterly retreat. So, after the first Sunday, did 
the promising young man, whose family, being Presbyterians, 
were deeply grieved that he should assist at Unitarian worship. 
If he had stayed we might have converted him or have soft- 
ened his prejudices. We have had such fortune with some 
others. The Alleghanians were soon called away on a pro- 
fessional tour, and shortly the name of Mrs. Prindle appears 
on the musical records, the tradition of whose singing lingers 
among us to this day—a haunting melody. 

The place of the first reguiar service was the Brooklyn 
Female Academy, lineal predecessor of the Packer Institute 
and occupying the same site. Dr. Gannett had been engaged 
to preach, but for some reason could not come and sent John 
Ware, who, being detained on the Sound, arrived a little late 
and a good deal disquieted. No echo of that first sermon has 
come down to us, but, because it was John Ware who preached 
it, it was surely good. So were the next following for several 
Sundays, Dr. Dewey preaching them. Ever after he had a cer- 
tain tenderness for this Society, because of the response to 
that preaching, and extended it to me, when in due time I came 
into the good inheritance. At the first service there were 
about fifty male persons present, and one of these, Mr. W. P. 
Beale, a member of our Society from that beginning, is with 
us here to-day. Strangely enough, in view of their perennial 
help, the women were not counted, but of those who heard 
those sermons of Mr. Ware and Dr. Dewey we have Mrs. 
Whitney, Mrs. Seaver and Mrs. Boggs still with us, by God’s 
grace; and if Mrs. Manning did not enter on the work with 
these she was not far behind. 

That, in its early course, the Society knew good preach- 
ing when it heard it, is shown plainly enough by the calls ex- 
tended to James Freeman Clarke and Horatio Stebbins in 1852, 
and to Thomas Starr King in 1853. Whatever good has come 
to you from other men, it is easy to imagine what a career of 
usefulness and honor would have been Freeman Clarke’s if 
he had come. He had already engaged to come for six 

8 


months, when his wife’s health compelled a European journey, 
and the Society, not knowing when he would return, reluc- 
tantly abandoned him and turned to that great soul, Horatio 
Stebbins, whose subsequent ministry in San Francisco began 
on the same day with mine in Brooklyn and ran parallel with 
it for five and thirty years. 

With him matters went so far that a house was hired for 
him and the money for its furnishing secured. He was then 
preaching in Fitchburg, Mass., and such constraint was put 
upon him that he could not get away. The ill news came on 
Sunday morning, January 1, 1853, and the Scripture for the 
day might well have been that which recites the successive 
calamities of Job. For it was signalized by the burning of 
the Female Academy, with the entire rolling stock of the So- 
ciety, hymn-books, Sunday-School library, etc. Nevertheless 
there was the usual service, at the usual hour, in the Brook- 
lyn Institute, a kind of torture-chamber,then, where, from the 
high and narrow seats, one’s feet dangled in mid-air. Secre- 
tary Seaver must have bustled round that morning in a lively 
manner. Four months later, April 23, services were held for 
the first time in the Brooklyn Athenzum, then a brand-new 
building and the finest in the city nota church. But in the 
meantime Starr King, of glorious fame, had been called, as 
vainly as the others heretofore, and Samuel Longfellow had 
been heard one Sunday, April 16, the last Sunday in the 
Brooklyn Institute. He was engaged in advance to preach 
six months, but was not kept upon the anxious seat so long. 
June 13, 1853, he received a unanimous call. Before his 
first preaching some had been much attracted to his friend, 
Samuel Johnson; probably we should make no mistake if we 
regarded Mr. Manning as the chief of these. But Mr. Johnson 
was too definitely and even sharply radical for the majority, 
and he said: ‘‘ You must hear my friend Longfellow.” Upon 
this hint he came, with the result which I have signified al- 
ready. I should have said that in June, 1852, the Society 
was legally organized with a Board of Trustees, of which 
Charles M. Olcott was president. This organization contem- 
plated the existence of a church, so called, made up of com- 
municants (persons partaking of the Lord’s Supper), but no 
such differentiation had taken place on Mr. Longfellow’s 


9 


arrival, and there never was any such. Mr. Longfellow 
administered the Lord’s Supper, but to the entire congrega- 
tion—a measure hardly less radical than would have been total 
abstention from therite. From the amended By-Laws of the 
Society all mention of an interior ‘‘church” is rigidly ex- 
cluded. Article I. of Section 2 reads: ‘‘ The pastor and congre- 
gation constitute the Society, and no subscription or assent to 
any formula of faith shall be required as a qualification for 
church membership.” This article, if I mistake not, dates 
from 1854, when it was inversely responsive to an elaborate 
creed which had recently been smuggled into an annual 
report of the American Unitarian Association, and had re- 
ceived the attention of Theodore Parker in one of the most 
pungent letters that he ever wrote. 

Mr. Longfellow’s first sermon in the Athenzum was 
printed; also the first after his ordination in October, 1853. 
Both of these sermons, ‘‘ The Word Preached”’ and ‘‘ A Spiritual 
and Working Church,” are preserved in the collection of Mr. 
Longfellow’s sermons, made since his death. He said in the 
former: ‘‘ The pulpit must not present a theology which con- 
tradicts clear facts of science or of human nature. It must 
not teach a bibliolatry which shuts its eyes tothe plainest dic- 
tates of common-sense or puts itself in antagonism to reason 
and conscience—to the living word of God in the soul.” ‘‘ As 
I walked through your beautiful streets,” he said, ‘‘I won- 
dered into which of these homes shall I go, and leave, perhaps, 
some benediction.”” The words were prophecy of a benediction 
as inclusive as the homes he entered and the friendships that 
he made. In thesermon following his ordination, at which Dr. 
Furness preached the sermon and Dr. Bellows gave the right 
hand of fellowship, Mr. Longfellow defined a church as ‘‘a 
society of men, women and children, associated together by a 
religious spirit for a religious work.” ‘: Christian,” he said, 
must mean simply ‘‘ religious,” or it would be sectarian. To 
the name ‘‘ Unitarian” he objected, for Martineau’s reason— 
it seemed to found a religious society on a theological doc- 
trine. He sketched a scheme of work, some features of 
which were at once accepted by the Society and have charac- 
terized it ever since; notably monthly collections for charita- 
ble purposes. Another feature, ‘‘the printing and distribu- 

10 


ting of books and tracts,’’ was never realized during his 
ministry, but since 1875 we have been faithful to the early 
hope in this respect. 

The settlement of Mr. Longfellow was one of various 
signs that the new Society was gradually putting off the old 
man of Unitarian orthodoxy and putting on the new man of 
‘‘Parkerism,” transcendentalism, liberalism, rationalism. 
From the time of his settlement the Society proceeded rapidly 
to develop a strongly individual character, reflecting that of 
the pastor, who had a way of his own for doing everything 
he did. Did he baptize children, the service was a tender 
jubilee; did he marry people, the service was no mere cere- 
mony but a sacred inspiration; no ministration to the sorrow- 
ing was ever less formal or more comforting than his; and 
“‘the communion,” so called, was indeed that, human and 
divine, as he moved about among the people, carrying the 
elements in his own hands and breathing little fragmentary 
words out of the Bible or from his own spiritual deep. Men 
and women after his own kind gravitated to him and stood 
by him with unalterable devotion. There was growth by 
elimination as well as by addition. Some dropped away and 
others stayed who might as well have gone. His ministry 
attracted no crowds; it built up no great society; by our con- 
temporary standards—numbers and bigness, noise and shout- 
ing—it was of smallaccount. Tried by the highest standards, 
it was a success but seldom paralleled in the religious life of 
nineteenth century communities. 

For several years the happiness of those who have no his- 
tory fell to the lot of the Society. In the political world, the 
slave-power was marching on from one aggression to another, 
and Mr. Longfellow did what he could for the ideals of free- 
dom and humanity, let who would hear him or forbear. In 
1856 there was talk of purchasing the little church which is 
‘still standing on the corner of Atlantic and Bond Streets, not 
a brilliant idea, as seen from the present standing of that 
tegion. In May, 1857, it was resolved to build a chapel on 
the ground which we now occupy. ‘‘ Chapel” was Mr. Long- 
fellow’s word, and ‘‘New Chapel” his designation of the 
‘completed building, from which many never varied their lives 
long. A building committee was appointed May 7, and ground 

HUE 


was broken the next month. With afresh access of that 
genial optimism which marks religious undertakings, the cost 
of the building (the land, orrzbile dictu, being leased) was 
estimated at $14,000, and wasin the event some $13,000 more. 
To make bad matters worse, the business crash of 1857 super- 
vened, so that not all the $9,000 subscribed was paid in. The 
sale of pews reduced the debt considerably, but a tidy re- 
siduum of $10,000 was left—more than the original subscrip- 
tion. This, with the ground rent, was sometimes an almost 
fatal drain on the resources of the people. Question as we 
may the wisdom of this business, it should be remembered 
that there was no resort to such denominational or otherwise 
external help as has latterly become the habit of all church- 
building enterprises among Unitarians and others. However 
straitened, we have never gone away from home for the 
relief required. 

I have told you more than once the story of the lilac- 
covered sermon which in the spring of 1858 was sent to a 
friend in Bridgewater, Mass., by Mr. Plimpton, for a long 
time one of the most influential members of our Society. 
From that friend it came into my hands, and was my first in-. 
timation of the existence of this Society, and shaped my 
dream of what a religious society should be. It was Mr. 
Longfellow’s dedication sermon, preached March 2, 1858. A 
better sermon was never preached under this lowly roof. My 
dear friend, Mrs. Mills, wished to have me re-deliver it on 
some anniversary occasion, and one of my vain regrets is that 
I neyer met her wishes in this particular. When the year 
1908 brings round the fiftieth anniversary of the dedication, 
you must see to it that your minister—I wonder who—reads. 
it then, and gives out the noble hymn which Samuel Johnson. 
wrote for the event: 


“To Light that shines in stars and souls, 
To Law that rounds the world with calm, 
To Love whose equal triumph rolls 
Through martyr’s prayer and angel's psalm, 
We wed these walls with unseen bands 
In holier shrines not made with hands.” 


The text of the sermon was, ‘‘ One God and Father of all, 
who is above all and through all and in you all.” It was the: 
12 


highest and most characteristic flight of Mr. Longfellow’s 
mind. The flood of years has not denuded its essential truth 
of any part of its significance nor washed away from it one 
grain of gold. 

A different text was suggested for the dedication sermon 
by some malicious person: ‘‘ This man began to build and was 
not able to finish ”—a reflection on the fact that higher walls 
were at first intended, but not carried up, the money giving 
out. But there was great pride and comfort in the new home 
and much satisfaction in the vesper service, the first of its 
kind established in any of our churches. It has had copies, 
few of them equal to the original, which, with the hymns 
written expressly for it by Mr. Longfellow, was a singularly 
happy product of his inspiration. It was a vital growth of 
his insight and imagination, and detached from him, as in 
Mr. Staples’s case and mine, was an uprooted tree. For Mr. 
Longfellow its popularity was its main defect. Its 
appropriate quietness was devastated by the swarming 
crowd. 

It was a tragedy that Mr. Longfellow remained with the 
Society but two years after the building of the church into 
whose foundations and superstructure had gone so much of 
his affectionate and careful thought. The strain of the polit- 
ical situation may have had something to do with the event. 
A plain-spoken, kindly man warned me to this effect. ‘‘ Some 
of us,” he said, ‘‘went round and let all the benches, and 
then Mr. Longfellow preached a John Brown sermon and 
drove them allaway.” This was a gross exaggeration with a 
kernel of reality. There was a John Brown sermon, and 
there were others of like sterling quality, deprecated by the 
more cautious in a halting and equivocating time; but a fuller 
tide of health would have carried Mr. Longfellow over into 
the years of the great war, when he would not have been 
fierce enough for those who had by this time plucked up their 
drowning courage by the locks. June 24, 1860 (having re- 
signed his charge in April), he preached his ‘‘ Parting Words,” 
the text from Deut., xv, 1—‘‘ At the end of seven years thou 
shalt make arelease.”” It was a noble exposition of his views 
and feelings on such great themes as God, Human Nature, 
Jesus, the Bible, the Nature of Religion; and all that is essen- 


3 


tial to the higher liberalism of to-day is packed within the 
limits of that one superb discourse. 

In the fall of 1860 the Society showed a noble prescience 
by calling William J. Potter, then just settled in New Bedford. 
His coming would have meant immeasurable good for Brook- 
lyn, as his staying in New Bedford did for that favored city, 
where, after publishing ‘‘ Twenty-five Sermons of Twenty- 
five Years’’—the best expression of our later thought—he 
still kept bravely on. Equally unsuccessful was the attempt 
to capture Octavius Frothingham, then barely entered on his 
brilliant course in New York City. In June, 1861, Rev. N. A. 
Staples, of Milwaukee, preached for you once or twice, and 
you hastened to invite him to remain with you. But, for all 
your haste, your letter found him in camp before Washington 
as chaplain of the Sixth Wisconsin Volunteers. Having 
served out his term in that capacity, he came to you in Novem- 
ber, Mr. Frothingham preaching the installation sermon, 
November 6, and Dr. Osgood refuting it as best he could 
within the limits and obstructions of the installation prayer. 
Preaching his last sermon November 15, 1863, his active 
Brooklyn ministry exceeded two years only by one week. 
But in those two years he made a wonderful impression. 
For this Society they were years of pride and victory, for him 
a period of alternating hopes and fears and heroic struggle 
against fearful odds. A sick man for years, and sicker than 
ever when he came to you, his sermons were the embodiment 
of health, the expression of an amazing intellectual vitality. 
Somehow the heavens were opened to him as they had never 
been before, and he rejoiced in the vision with exceeding 
great joy, and reported it to his people in words of tingling 
flame. In 1870 I wrote, at your desire, a sketch of his life, 
with a few of his complete sermons and selections from 
others. These sermons and fragments justify the conviction 
that here was a preacher of uncommon force and power. But 
the printed page does not tell the whole story. The person- 
ality of the preacher added to the vigor of his thought and to 
his depth of feeling a magnetic force which multiplied their 
effect with the prodigality of a numerical exponent, cubing 
upon their statical significance to the tenth and hundredth 
power. 

14 


Agreeing substantially with Mr. Longfellow’s theological 
and critical opinions, Mr. Staples was less considerate than 
he had been of the prejudices and even of the sensibilities of 
backward minds. In one respect he differed widely from Mr. 
Longfellow. He was much more enamored than he of the 
new science which in those years was coming in upon us in a 
flood. He was one of the first among us to take up into his 
preaching the significance of Darwin and Spencer, and no one 
has done it since with more of insight into the spiritual real- 
ities involved. In this respect his preaching was a wonderful 
anticipation. 

The excitements and the terrors of the Civil War wore out 
his failing strength at an accelerated pace. He would sit 
up all night to get the news, leaning out of his window to 
catch some newsboy’s far off cry of victory or defeat. His 
flaming soul burned up the house of life. You saw the 
approaching end, while as yet he could not, the splendor of 
his opportunity blinding him to all beside. Fortunately the 
last stage of his disease was short and swift. It was glad- 
dened for him by his consciousness of having beaten out 
some little of his real music and by the unspeakable ten- 
derness of many friends. He died February 5, 1864. He 
was only thirty-three years old. But in him it was fulfilled 
as it is written: ‘‘ He, being made perfect in a short time, 
fulfilled a long time.” 

Nothing could be more natural than for the Society to 
turn in its bereavement and its helplessness to Robert 
Collyer. He had been Staples’s closest friend, and at his 
funeral, and again, more carefully, he had brought to you 
the solace of an exquisite appreciation of his character and 
mind. Mr. Collyer proving intractable to your desires, in 
May you sent a letter to your present minister, then a senior 
student in the Harvard Divinity School, and asked him to 
come and preach for you three months, beginning Septem- 
ber 11. He came, bringing with him for a reviving cordial 
a call from the Haverhill Society, to which he had much 
recourse in the first stages of the experiment. But the 
agony was not prolonged. In less than two months (Novem- 
ber 6) he received your invitation to remain. It was the 
Sunday before Lincoln’s re-election, and my sermon was from 


a5 


the text, ‘‘What God hath joined together,” interpreted as 
Liberty and Union, ‘‘let not man put asunder.” I think it 
cost me one dissentient vote. I was ordained and installed 
December 21. Mr. Collyer preached the sermon, and when, 
twenty-five years later, he preached it over again to us, it 
seemed to have gathered strength and sweetness every year, 
though, when we first heard it, it seemed too good to be 
improved. 

It willalways be to me one of the incomprehensible things 
that you should have made this venture, and another that some- 
how my ‘‘staying quality’ prevailed over the difficulties of 
my position. Could I have compared myself, as I can now, 
with Longfellow and Staples, wild horses could not have 
drawn me from the safe inconspicuity of Haverhill to such a 
perilous seat. Or would the joyous hardihood of youth have 
made me bold to snatch what was so tempting to my hand? 
Certain it is that I was dreadfully young and crude and inex- 
perienced. To make bad matters worse, my coming here was 
close upon the heels of five years of incessant overwork, and a 
starvation diet, necessitated by the conditions of a course of 
education without money and a passion for the private owner- 
ship of books. Hence came reaction and, where I had ex- 
pected unwonted access of ideas, an emptiness as if my brains 
were out. Just at the worst, a friend took me off to the flag- 
raising on Fort Sumter, so that I was one of those who took 
to Charleston, where the rebellion had begun, the news of 
Lee’s surrender and the rebellion’s end, and after my return 
another friend welcomed me to his country home, and these 
novel situations and these genial influences brought back the 
blood into my heart, the thinking stuff into my brain. Mean- 
time, and for a year or two, there was a gradual exodus from 
the Society of the less stable elements. It was natural and 
inevitable that those casually attracted by Mr. Staples’s 
calcium light should not rejoice in such ‘‘a candle of the 
Lord” as had been established in his place. Presently I 
found myself with a constituency almost without exception 
signed and sealed with Mr. Longfellow’s abiding spirit. Then 
it began to grow, and my very own began to come to me, 
until, in 1872, the condition of the Society seemed strong 
enough to warrant the undertaking of an heroic enterprise— 

16 


the payment of the debt incurred when the church was built, 
and which, in the course of fourteen years of various change 
and growth, had not been diminished. The sum of $10,400 was 
raised, an amount nearly $2,000 in excess of the original sub- 
scription for the church. The event could not have been more 
timely, for the next year came Black Friday and the long period 
of commercial misery and ruin following that fateful day. If 
we had waited a year, the debt might never have been paid, 
and the weight of that, added to our ground-rent, that ‘‘old 
man of the sea,’’ would have been a well-nigh insuperable 
burden. We cannot be too grateful to those who initiated 
and carried out this enterprise. But some of those who were 
most prominent in it were captivated with the idea thata 
church must be ‘‘a paying concern,” that the rental must 
meet the expenses, and, to bring about this condition, the 
rents of the pews were so much increased that, coinciding 
with the long financial depression, the increase tended to 
freeze out a good many of our people who could not afford 
the higher rates. This has always seemed to me one of the 
most ill-considered and unfortunate turns in the affairs of our . 
Society, in principle radically wrong, disastrous in its effect. ~ 

The payment of the standing debt left unpaid a floating 
debt which had mounted nearly to $5,000 by January, 1876, 
when it was absolutely discharged, and since then, with brief 
and inconsiderable exceptions—of late years without any— 
we have enjoyed the distinction, most uncommon among 
churches, of being free from debt, astate of things well pleas- 
ing tomy soul, inheriting, as I do, from my father—who was, 
as Charles Lamb described his own, ‘‘a man of most incor- 
tigible and losing honesty ”—a hatred of debt which is one of 
the most serious passions of my life. 

In 1876 we celebrated the Twenty-fifth Anniversary of 
the church foundation, Dr. Bellows and Mr. Frothingham 
making the most notable contributions. Mr. Frothingham’s 
portraitures of Longfellow and Staples were by a master’s 
hand. Almost simultaneously we entered upon the work of 
sermon publication and distribution. This was suggested by 
Mr. Bryant one pleasant day as we were taking one of our 
first walks together in my beloved Chesterfield. Mr. Froth- 
ingham had set an example which it seemed presumptuous for 


17 


me to follow, but in the event I have been glad of my te- 
merity. In the course of twenty-six years we have published 
twenty-six series of eight numbers each—in all some 300,000 
copies. More of the work of distribution has fallen to Mr. 
Bryant than to any other, and, I trust, more of the satisfaction 
and delight. Hereby Ihave enjoyed an extension of my pul- 
pit work and influence, which has been to me a consolation 
but for which I should sometimes have wearied of the small- 
ness of my way. It has brought to me hundreds of letters 
from all parts of America and from other lands, not to be 
touehed by which, sometimes to grateful tears, would mark 
me as the veriest churl. It has assured me a larger parish of 
at least one thousand souls. If one sermon a month is their 
portion, that is as many assome of you here at home find nec- 
essary for your spiritual edification. 

Closely allied with this work of sermon publication, and 
indeed one of its most effective instruments, has been the work 
of our Post Office Mission, now a committee of the Women’s 
Branch Alliance, but in its origin anticipating that. Its first 
meeting, in 1886, was at the house of Mrs. Faris, and shortly 
all the meetings were at the house of Mrs. William Henry 
Parsons, whose interest in the work was very great and did 
not slacken when from year to year weakness and pain en- 
croached upon her bodily strength but could not chill the 
ardor of her mind. In 1888 Mrs. Andrew Jacobs was made 
chairman of the Mission, and for twelve years continued in 
this office, doing an incalculable amount of conscientious 
work. Under her charge the work, now issuing from the 
Sunday-School Room as a place of meeting, grew to its 
present bulk, and Mrs. Faris, the present chairman, takes no 
backward step. The Mission is at present corresponding with 
132 persons, nearly fifty of whom are in Texas and South 
Dakota. Ten of these correspondents are distributing agents. 
During the current year 3,722 sermons have been sent out, 
724 magazines, 728 papers, Christian Registers, etc., with 89 
letters, not to mention postals, 40 of these letters by the 
chairman of the Mission. Here is a work extremely personal, 
putting us in vital touch with more than one hundred men 
and women, many of them living lonely lives on the out- 
skirts of civilization, and prizing unspeakably their communi- 

18 


cation with a larger intellectual and spiritual life than that 
afforded by their immediate environment. We cannot bring 
to those who have done for us this patient and exacting work 
more gratitude and admiration than their fidelity, asking 
nothing, should receive. I bow with special reverence before 
that inner shrine of their activity—their correspondence with 
so many whose faces they have never seen. Innumerable the 
spirits they have touched to finer issues in this beautiful and 
tender way. 

The Women’s Branch Alliance, of which the Post Office 
Mission is a vital part—was instituted in 1887, taking up into 
itself the Beneficence Committee, which was organized at an 
early stage of our development. Beginning with a member- 
ship of 35, it has now more than 80 members on its 
roll, and its committees on Hospitality, Literature,and Be- 
neficence have done excellent work. The social life of our 
Society is now pretty much exhausted by the monthly meet- 
ings of the Alliance, and this life would be extremely one- 
sided and hyper-feminine were not the balance partly re- 
dressed by the church-aisle conference, which is held after 
every Sunday morning service. What would you think of a 
request, as in some churches, that you go out without speak- 
ing to anyone? Yours is, I think, a much more excellent 
way. The literary features of the Alliance work have taken 
a wide range and been profitable, both for instruction and 
righteousness, while the work of the Beneficence Committee, 
both as replenishing our treasury and as giving help where it 
is needed, has amply justified its name. I could not possibly 
exaggerate my sense of gratitude for what the Branch Alli- 
ance has done for the Society, and would have this feeling 
shared by everyone to whom the welfare of the Society is a 
cherished aim. 

That ours has been a colonizing church is plain to all who 
know the history of our interior life. One of our colonies is 
the Female Employment Society, which originated in the aspir- 
ations of certainnoble women here, and soon grew beyond our 
parish bounds. Another is the Flower Mission, which sprang 
like a red rose from the warm heart of Mrs. Beale. Another is 
the Brooklyn Guild, which had its personal origin within our 
ranks; here also some of its most active furtherance, the 


19 


Maxwell House standing preéminently for that individual 
help which it confesses in its name. The first private kinder- 
garten in the city was long supported by your hands, and the 
first public kindergarten was Mr. George W. Banker’s inspira- 
tion. All that we see to-day upon this fruitful tree is but 
what he foresaw. Reading within the week an interview of 
Mr. Andrew D. White with Tolstoi, I found that wonderful 
old man approving the publications of the Brooklyn Ethical 
Association as among the best things that had come to him 
from America. I would not make too much of that approval, 
but I have received too many testimonies to the value of those 
publications to doubt my own assurance of their usefulness 
and worth, or that of the Association in its general course. 
It began as a morning class in the Sunday-School, and went 
on to more ambitious, if not better things. I cannot but con- 
ceive that there was loss as well as gain in its expansive course. 
Dr. Janes was a born teacher, and you should have kept him 
here, though to do so you had been obliged to cut the 
minister adrift. I am glad of his success, but sorry that he 
ever left Brooklyn, where he is needed more, much more, than 
amidst the hum of Harvard’s college factories. 

Coming home again, by way of my allusion to the 
Sunday-School, I should say that that was instituted in 
September, 1851, and there are some of ‘‘the Whiting boys,” 
and perhaps others, with us still who were members of it in 
its earliest years. I found Mr. Gerrish superintending it. 
For twelve years he stood up to the work with rare capacity 
for it, loving little children with that pathetic passion which 
we often find in persons who have no children of their own. 
He was my dearest friend, and a great light went out for me 
and mine when he passed out of life. Mr. Potts took up the 
work and developed an exquisitely beautiful service; Mr. 
Wheeler came next for many faithful years, and Mr. Palmer 
for a shorter term; I took my turn, and one came after me 
who should be preferred before me in all the work that I have 
ever done of any kind, and still she holds the fort. If I 
began to mention teachers I should not know where to stop. 
Unfortunately we have not required so many latterly, but the 
quality has never before risen to so’ high a point of intelli- 
gence and moral inspiration. 

20 


The transition is easy from this point to our present 
choir, so largely has this been recruited from the Sunday- 
School class formerly taught by Miss Ellen Brackett. What- 
ever its defects—and those composing it are quite as sensible 
of these as the most critical among you—it has contributed 
more to our common worship than any previous musical organ- 
ization. ‘Time was when this was conducted at an annual ex- 
pense of more than $3,000, which the Society could ill afford 
to meet. I can truly say that our singers generally in those 
times entered earnestly into the spirit of our services. Some 
of them endeared themselves greatly to the congregation. 
But for myself, I wearied of the everlasting criticism of the 
music as a purely esthetic performance, and rejoiced when 
the excuse for such criticism was done away with forever. We 
have our failures still, but the moral temper of the situation 
is entirely changed. We are much indebted to our organist 
and chorister for his fidelity. I will not offend his modesty 
by so much as mentioning his name. 

A few words may be permitted me concerning the course 
of my own special work during the seven and thirty years of 
my ministry to this Society. In its general import it has 
continued the traditions of rational freedom so firmly estab- 
lished by Mr. Longfellow and Mr. Staples. I have taught 
with them the moral character of God; the natural re- 
ligiousness of man; the pure humanity of Jesus; the 
human origin of the Bible and its lack of all authority 
save that of its intrinsic rationality. Great changes have 
come over the spirit of the popular theology during my 
ministry. Before I came here I was warned of the danger of 
preaching for the Twenty-eighth Society in Boston (Theodore 
Parker’s)—a warning which I did not heed—and I have lately 
written a life of Theodore Parker which has been received 
with exceptional cordiality by the leading orthodox journals 
in this country and in England. It is more than thirty 
years since I expounded, with all possible frankness, 
‘* What the Bible Is and What It Is Not.” It was damnable 
heresy then, and now orthodox theological professors and 
orthodox preachers everywhere are racing with each other 
for my early goal, and expounding my doctrine ten times as 
fully and as cogently as I could at any time. In the Divinity 

21 


School it was my good fortune to live in an atmosphere quite 
as positively scientific as theological, so many of Agassiz’s 
students were my companions in Divinity Hall, and high 
debate on the Darwinian hypothesis was always goingon. I 
was an easy convert to that hypothesis, as should have been 
all Emersonians, and in general my early transcendentalism 
was gradually qualified by the scientific method. In the 
seventies all thoughtful men were struggling with what then 
seemed to be the materialistic implications of science, and I 
was not exempted from the common lot. ‘There were for me 
then sometimes moments of thick darkness, but, resolving to 
preach nothing of which I was not well assured, I found my 
sinking bark had reached another sea; that the inescapable 
truths were, after all, the best. No less on this account was 
I delighted when the long fight with the materialists culmi- 
nated in a glorious victory for the spiritual conception of the 
universe and man. Since the conclusion of that controversy 
my preaching has been less controversial, and, though better 
by that sign, perhaps less attractive to the passing crowd, to 
which some kind of a fight has latterly been an essential ele- 
ment of interest. If I cared to go upon the war-path, and 
bring you every Sunday a fresh string of scalps, there would 
be more to hear and to applaud, if not more to pay the bills. 
That chink of coin reminds me that, for our ability, we have 
done well on missionary lines, giving each year about $1,000, 
but some years nearer twice as much, including the expense 
of our own Publication Fund. 

During the period of my ministry, and especially during 
its latter part, I have done much with my pen not represented 
by my pulpit-work. So doing, I have assumed that I was ful- 
filling your purposes with more efficiency than by withholding 
from the proffered opportunity. For I have conceived myself 
to be your servant for the propagation of rational truth and 
noble enterprise by all rightful means. And so, writing the 
Life of Theodore Parker, or any other book, wzth your time, 
Ihave said: ‘‘It is your book,” you using my right hand and 
brain and heart to speak your truth and love to men beyond 
these narrow walls. 

Nevertheless I have done a fair amount of writing for your 
immediate edification: Eleven hundred and fifty-two sermons 

22 


and lectures, reserving for the writing of each sermon three 
days of perfect disengagement from all meaner things; toeach 
monthly lecture a much longer time. The lecturing went on 
for more than twenty years. It was an incalculable drain 
upon my time and strength. It filled my mind with useful 
knowledge upon various lines; that it did not often leave me 
spent for the regular sermons of each month I am by no means 
sure. But I seem to be forgetting that Iam not intending a 
personal history but the history of our Society. 

This has been subject to the stress and strain of our con- 
temporary life. The social gravitation has been away from 
the churches. Fifty years ago religious societies were the 
social centres in America; even in the great cities they long 
since ceased to be so. Thechurch-going habit, too, has mani- 
festly fallen off. Simultaneously this has come about: that 
the dependence of the churches is less and less on those con- 
ventionally bound to their support; more and more on those 
deliberately devoted to their aspirations andtheiraims. Inthe 
course of my own ministry I have had two or three good con- 
gregations. The Reaper whose name is Death and the per- 
petual flux of an unstable life have decimated and depleted 
them, and others have come in to fill the broken files. But 
never at any time, I think, have we been a more compact and 
homogeneous unit than we are to-day, bound together by 
stronger ties of affection, lifting a common heart more unre- 
servedly to beautiful and exigent ideals. 

Even where this life-history has seemed to be too much 
the mere biography of one minister or another, you (the peo- 
ple) have been implicated in it at every step—your earnest- 
ness, your constancy, your loving kindness, your fidelity. If 
the ministers have done something, the people have done in- 
finitely more. Your generosity has been to them a perpetual 
wonder, verging sometimes upon a doubting shame—‘‘ Can 
we deserve so much?” Then they have reflected that they 
were but your dull and broken weapons in the unending fight 
with ignorance and wrong. As Ihave looked over the rec- 
ords of the Society, and rallied my own thoughts, my heart 
has swelled with honest pride to see what men have served 
you all the way along in various capacities; what women, too; 
and I have wondered how many churches have had such noble 


23 


men and women conducting their affairs, how many could 
present so fair a record of unbroken harmony. It is simple 
truth that we have never had one parish quarrel in these fifty 
years. A good record that, aschurches go. It is a melancholy 
fact that the business of churches is frequently conducted on 
a lower level than that of the shop and the exchange. It has 
not been so among you. 

If I dared attempt it, how I should like to bless myself 
and you with a brief space of spiritual communion with those 
friends of high and liberal soul in whose light we have from 
time to time rejoiced! 


“They throng the silence of the breast, 
Imaginations strong and fair, 
The memory like a cloudless air, 
The conscience like a sea at rest.” 


But where should I begin? With Mrs. Mills, who was to 
me so large-hearted, motherly, and to all the vision of a high 
nobility of womanhood worthy of all obedience? Or with 
Mr. Manning?—large-brained, but with a larger heart; with 
philosophic calm revolving all the vaster problems of the time, 
and yet lynx-eyed for any human hurt. Vain the attempt to 
make the right beginning, or, that made, fitly to characterize, 
or even to name without many a culpable omission, those who 
have been our confidence and strength, our comfort and our 


peace. 


“In every nobler mood 
We feel the orient of their spirit glow, 
Part of our life’s unalterable good, 
Of all our saintlier aspiration; 
They come transfigured back, 
Secure from change in their high-hearted ways, 
Beautiful evermore.” 


It needs no word of mine to summon to this presence 
those who were nearest to your private hearts, those who 
loved this church of ours with a very great affection and gave 
to it their best of wisdom and of will. 

I have been speaking long, and yet how little have I told 
of our life-history! For this in its completeness would in- 
clude the aspirations that have been quickened here by ser- 
mon, hymn, and prayer; the comfort that has passed from 
soul to soul: the friendships that have been nourished in the 


24 


protecting shadow of this dear and pleasant place; the loftier 
ideals of social excellence and political justice and purity 
which have risen here upon the earnest mind; the daring 
hopes for earthly and immortal good which have been enter- 
tained within these sacred walls. The most that we can hope 
is that there have been many better men and women, many 
better young people and children, as the grand result of all 
that has been wrought and ventured here. 

Taking the road again, for ‘‘road-melody or marching 
music,” in Carlylean phrase, can we do better than to say and 
sing?— 

“« The Future hides in it 
Gladness and sorrow; 
We press till thorow, 


Naught that abides in it 
Daunting us—onward. 


‘* And solemn before us, 
Veiled, the dark Portal; 
Goal of all mortal. 

Stars silent rest o’er us, 
Graves under us silent! 


‘* But heard are the Voices, 
Heard are the Sages, 
The Worlds and the Ages: 
‘ Choose well; your choice is 
Brief and yet endless. 


‘« * Here eyes do regard you, 
In Eternity’s stillness; 
Here is all fulness, 

Ye brave, to reward you; 
Work and despair not.’” 


SILENT PRAYER, CHOIR RESPONDING: 


Eternal ruler of the ceaseless round 
Of circling planets singing on their way! 
Guide of the nations from the night profound, 
Into the glory of the perfect day! 
Rule in our hearts that we may ever be 
Guided and strengthened and upheld by Thee. 


We would be one in hatred of all wrong, 
One in our love of all things sweet and fair, 
One with the joy that breaketh into song, 


25 


One with the grief that trembles into prayer, 
One in the power that makes Thy children free 
To follow Truth, and thus to follow Thee. 
—John W. Chadwick. 


THANKOFFERING. 


CHOIR: “The Lord is King.”— 7Zriméell. 


HYMN. Tune: Federal Street. 


Come, let us sing a tender song 
Of those our glances seek in vain! 
Dear heavenly friends, the way is long 
On which we meet them not again! 


But still, in memory’s silent deeps, 
Their spirits pure with us abide, 

And faithful love its secret keeps 
Of things beyond the parting tide. 


Hail, happy saint, whose spirit lives 
Unwasted in the songs you sung! 

And you, whose voice such challenge gives, 
As if a silver ciarion rung! 


And all who in the days no more, 
With eager mind and glowing heart, 

Here service gave and witness bore, 
As knowing well the better part. 


Come, let us sing a braver song 
Of these—of all the good and true 
Within the veil; God, make us strong, 
More than they dreamed to wake and do! 
IgOI. —John W. Chadwick. 


BENEDICTION. 


26 


EVENING SERVICE. 


ORGAN: “ Andante in F.”— Volkmar. 


HYMN: Cuore. 


Again as evening’s shadow falls 

We gather in these hallowed walls, 
And vesper hymn and vesper prayer 
Rise mingling on the holy air. 


May struggling hearts that seek release 
Here find the rest of God’s own peace, 

And strengthened here by hymn and prayer 
Lay down the burden and the care. 


O God, our Light! to Thee we bow— 
Within all shadows standest Thou; 
Give deeper calm than night can bring. 
Give sweeter songs than lips can sing. 


Life’s tumult we must meet again, 
We cannot at the shrine remain; 
But in the spirit’s secret cell 
May hymn and prayer forever dwell. 
—Samuel Longfellow. 


SCRIPTURE READING: REV. JOHN P. FORBES. 


PRAYER: REV. ROBERT COLLYER. 


O Thou, the Eternal One, our Father, we gather together 
to-night in Thy name to lift our hearts to Thee, we trust in 
spirit and truth; to speak to each other of the years that have 
gone and, by Thy blessing, it may be, of the years to come; 
to look back and see what Thou hast done to help and bless 


27 


Thy sons and daughters in this place. All those years ago 
they gathered together in Thy name, they gathered that they 
might bear witness to Thy truth; that they might walk in 
the light, as children of the light; that they might do Thy 

will on earth as it is done in heaven, by Thy help and bless- 
ing, through all the time they should stay in this place; to 
bear free witness to Thy truth fearlessly and perpetually; to 
wait on Thee for the word to say; to look unto Thee for 
direction in the things they would do, the minister and the 
congregation together being of one. heart and one mind in 
Thy service; to be faithful to the truth as Thou shouldst de- 
liver it unto them, as they should see it in the wide world and 
the heavens, see it as Thy dear Son saw it when He was with 
us on the earth, in the human soul, in the great human family, 
in the glory and beauty of the world, in the shadow and in 
the sunshine, and find lessons everywhere they could teach 
and live out in their lives. They gathered together for this 
great purpose, and through all the years Thou hast maintained 
them as they have tried to maintain Thy truth, and to be 
faithful in word and deed through all. Now we meet, in the 
memory of the years, to bless Thee for the great bounty and 
benediction that has rested upon this church; for all the 
noble things they have been able to do in Thy name and as 
witnesses of Thy truth, and as men and women close knitted 
to this great city in which the church has stood as a light set 
ona hill. We cannot tell the story, we can only bless Thee 
that it has been so, and that minister and people have stood 
together for all that was true and lovely and of good report. 
Through evil report, as through good report, they have stood, 
a burning and a shining light. We bless Thee for the min- 
istry of the church, so beautiful, sonoble, as some of us so well 
know; so faithful and so true to the grand, great charter of 
freedom on which the church was founded. And we bless 
Thee for the people that have maintained the ministers in 
their place, that have been so faithful and true through 
shadow and shine to this pulpit and its teachings. What 
could they have done for Thee, or for the truth, or for the 
great seething life of this great city, had they not so stood 
together, resolute to be of one heart and of one mind for 
Thee and for the Gospel, striving to do the work that Christ 

28 


_ did when He was with us, taking Him for their divine pattern, 
and thus enlarging all the boundaries of faith, as they were 
led to see how great it is, how beautiful, how good, how true, 
holding in their hearts that grand, sweet gospel, to which we 
have just listened, of love; despising no man or woman, hold- 
ing them all together as Thy children, and when it seemed, 
as sometimes it seems to us all, that it was hopeless to try-to 
do any more, shaking out their great banner of hope again, 
and singing their song—a bright and cheerful psalm of victory; 
now and then sitting by the waters and mourning for some 
great sorrow, but then how tenderly, how sweetly the words 
would come, touching the sorrows that came to these people 
as they come to us all; finding every day a sacred day, not 
alone here in this place, but yonder at the forge, on the 
streets, in the marts of business, everywhere the work of God 
to do, and trying to do it, living it out in their lives, in their 
business, in their calling, whatever it might be, Thy true 
sons, Thy true daughters. We cannot tell the story of the 
sweetness and light that has been learned in the homes that 
have been born out of this church—born again, born from 
above, born to beauty and strength; for they are pillars, the 
men and women, the fathers and mothers and children who 
will remember this place, the fathers and mothers and children 
who will think of it in the blessed world also to which they 
have gone, all sacred, all beautiful, all true, after these fifty 
years. Now shall we ask that Thy blessing may rest upon 
us to-night as we recall these memories and touch these 
sacred and beautiful things; that we may all feel that we are 
of one heart and one mind, diverse in opinions, belonging to 
this church, that church, no church, yet knitted and blended 
together in a charity that knows no difference, free still to 
preach Thy free Gospel wherever we may go, but not free to 
disregard the noble, deep, heart-searching love that endureth 
all things and believeth all things and never faileth. Let 
Thy blessing rest on these moments, and then on all the 
years to come, which we cannot scan but still can travel to- 
ward, sure that as Thy people have been faithful so they will 
be; and the little one, we trust, shall become a thousand, the 
small one a great and noble church of God whose power shall 
be felt not alone in this city, but through all the land, and 


a9 


Thine shall be the kingdom and the power and the glory 
forever andever. Amen. 


CHOIR: “ The Lord’s Prayer.” 


HYMN. Tune: Hursley. 


O Thou whose perfect goodness crowns 
With peace and joy this sacred day, 

Our hearts are glad for all the years 
Thy love has kept us in Thy way. 


Thy glorious truth has made us free 
From bounds of sect and bonds of creed; 
Thy light has shone that we might see 
Our own in every brother’s need. 


For common tasks of help and cheer, 
For quiet hours of thought and prayer, 

For moments when we seemed to feel 
The breath of a diviner air; 


For mutual love and trust that keep 
Unchanged through all the changing time; 
For friends within the veil who thrill 
Our spirits with a hope sublime ;— 


For this, and more than words can say, 
We praise and bless Thy holy name. 

Come life or death, enough to know 
That Thou art evermore the same! 


—John W. Chadwick. 


ADDRESSES: 


Mr. Cuapwick: There has not been a minister of All 
Souls’ Church in my day in whom I have not rejoiced. It was 
so with Dr. Bellows, that incomparable man. It was so with 
Theodore Williams, who made good his name, ‘‘the gift of 
God,” to me. And it is so with Mr. Slicer, whose devotion 
to his work and intellectual vitality and personal fidelity are 
to me a constant inspiration, if not sometimes an unhappy 
shame. His name is Thomas, and he has his doubts about 


30 


some things, but we have none that he will speak to us to- 
night the word of cheer.* 


REV. THOMAS R. SLICER: 


Mr. Chadwick and friends, I could very well wish that 
Dr. Bellows might have some share in your rejoicing at this 
Fiftieth Anniversary, as he had so great a share in fellow- 
ship with your ministers in the years in which they and he 
worked together in the two cities which now are one. I am, 
however, to speak to you out of my affection, if not out of 
my knowledge of all that has passed upon you and in which 
the church of All Souls has had a share. 

It is great happiness to come to a place in which you 
have no doubts. Your minister has said—your minister! 
think of his speaking of any man’s doubts!—your minister of 
great faith out of his doubts has spoken of some doubts that 
must come to every active man in this active time, but of one 
thing I am quite sure, that the Second Church, this church, 
has justified its existence in this half century of life. 

It is a singular contrast, that which confronts us in think- 
ing of a church like this, of a church piling up institutions, 
growing moss, gathering accumulations of beliefs, fortifying 
itself, stopping its leaks, keeping itself from running out by 
enlarging its accumulations of the past. Now I have no 
doubt that your minds could select several such churches as 
that, when thinking of the many churches that you know. 
But here is a church which began as a seed and appeared as a 
growth from the soil, and leafed out on every side into foliage 
and strength, put out great branches, spread its shade over 
those that felt themselves to be in a weary land, and flowered 
at its top and bore its fruit, and at the end of a half century 
has life in itself. 

I don’t wonder that Paul said when they were trying to 
confound him with something they had built: ‘‘I thank God 
that I baptized none of you but Crispus and Gaius; and it 
may be some of the household of Stephanus; besides, I know 


* The addresses following are printed as delivered, with few, very few, corrections 
and omissions. For the stenographic reports we are indebted to Mrs, Clara Brockway 
and Miss Sessions, with the assistance of Miss Angell. 


31 


not whether I baptized any other. For Christ sent me not to 
baptize, but to tell the good news.” That is, he was sent to 
enlarge an idea, to illumine an ideal, to carry forward a glad 
announcement, and in his mind, as in ours, the enlargement 
of a thought, the justification of an ideal, is better than the 
establishment of any institution. 

I cannot refrain from saying there is a certain aptness 
between the history of this church, as I have been informed 
of it, and the fact that it is on leased ground. Weare all 
sorry that it is so, but there is a certain aptness aboutit. It 
never intended to be fixed in idea, and there seems a certain 
pathetic aptness in the fact it cannot fix itself on its founda- 
tion as upon owned land; to me there is a pathos in that. It 
is a thing we only smile at in the idea, but the curious thing 
about it is that if anybody wanted to move on in all these 
fifty years to a new intellectual position this church was ready 
to move. It had its baggage in the smallest possible compass 
of thought, that is, in the smallest possible compass that need 
encumber it. It easily adjusted itself to every change, and 
what those changes are I need scarcely remind you. 

It is a great thing to have been the minister of achurch in 
these last fifty years, or any part of them, so many things 
have come to be better, so many things to which only—I say 
this with perfect deference to every sister church—only a 
church like this could perfectly adjust itself. For instance, 
many churches by their very constitution and traditions have 
to defend themselves against the inroads of new thought. A 
church like this is hospitable to every thought that knocks at 
its door. It knocks at the minister’s study door first, 
knocks at the mind door of every member of a church like 
this, and the minister and people come together. Not, 
though, to sit like robins in a nest with their mouths open to 
be fed with a worm of modern discovery, but, a little past 
feeding time, getting their own living like birds on the wing, 
and ready with the minister to sing heartily the new song 
that he has learned in his study, and which they have learned 
in their own reading and contact with the world. 

It is a great thing to be in a church the doors of aaa 
swing both ways, to let people in with hospitality and let any- 
body out that wants to go. That is the reason our churches 


32 


prosper with the time; they never put a brake on going up 
hill. They are conscious that it is safe even to drive a trifle 
fast down hill and part let go the brakes; even then they are 
so sure of the team, the machinery and build of the wagon, 
that nothing can happen, no stumbling of the team, no giv- 
ing way of the mechanism, no unsteady hands on the lines. 
Let us enjoy this thing when it comes—this very swiftness of 
motion in the thinking of the Liberal Church which is peril to 
the onlooker, while the folks riding do not seem to be disturbed. 

Let me call your attention for the moment to the things 
that have made us glad in these years we have been working, 
and been so glad to be at work. Itis a great thing to have 
got rid of special creation. Itis a great thing to have come 
into the inheritance of the unfolding world. Fifty years ago, 
when this church began to be, there was much disturbance of 
the pulpit also for fear there should be some discredit thrown 
on the workmanship of the Great Artificer, and that things 
he had made and put on the surface of the world should not be 
seen to be in their place and bear the mark of the workman’s 
hand. ‘‘The Vestiges of Creation” appeared on the other 
side of the water, the first beginnings of the doctrine of de- 
velopment, not yet coming to its full expression, as it did in 
1859. Already there was some concern about the Creator, a 
kind of pathetic anxiety that God should be found not quite 
up to his task; that somebody would discover something that 
had grown by itself, that should have come into being without 
some mark of the Workman’s hand upon it. 

It is a great thing to have got to the point where we can 
let God create as He will and as He must in all the range of 
this boundless universe which in these fifty years has come 
to be unfolded in our vision; to be rid of the little cabinet- 
world and to come into the inheritance of a universe that is 
worth while and a Creator that is up to his task. Every Uni- 
tarian church in these fifty years has been a sharer in this 
steady advance, not held back, not restrained, not afraid. 
And they are to be congratulated in heaven to-day who grad- 
uated into the glory that resulted from the thought of this 
place, that they went up to God unafraid of anything that 
might be in God’s world. The habit of courage has been the 
habit of this place. 


33 


More than this: Here has been a place in which there 
has never been the slightest doubt that faith and reason were 
compatible in the same mind. When John Henry Newman 
said that faith and reason were incompatible in the same 
mind, or nearly that, he announced what must be the death 
of intelligence on the one side or unwise abandonment of 
faith upon the other. But here was a place—as many such 
places are to be found—in which the human mind was not 
afraid of its own conclusions, and found those conclusions 
perfectly consistent with the deepest religious life. 

What is not commonly understood by those who are not 
of our own faith is that Unitarianism began not as an intelli- 
gent protest simply, but as a religious overflow, as a spiritual 
overflowing. If you will take the statements of Dr. Chan- 
ning—in that same year, in September, in which the Church 
of All Souls was established in New York, or nearly the same 
year—in his ‘‘ Five Points of Unitarianism,” each one of them 
is a vindication of some moral purpose and spiritual ideal, 
not simply an intellectual protest. And so people have said, 
‘“Yes, they are very intelligent people, these Unitarians, but 
they have no force, no power in their religion; there is no 
warmth in it.” I wrote to somebody the other day who wrote 
me that Unitarianism was a religion that had no warmth in 
it: ‘‘An electric light, an incandescent lamp, gives more 
light than a pine knot, and less heat, and the business of 
lamps is to light, light the path of him who would go. 
And as to the pine knot, it was its infirmity that it had to 
throw out heat and soot as well as light.” I have never seen 
any reason for bewailing the introduction of electricity as a 
lighting agent into the world. The fact is contrary to the 
thought of those who complain that a church like this fur- 
nishes only light to see by. It-furnishes also warmth, before 
which one suns himself. It is not necessary, it is entirely 
unnecessary, that we should get the warmth of the room out 
of the light of the room. What is to hinder our lighting up 
the electric lamp and sunning ourselves before the ever ready 
sunshine of the grate where the coal burns? 

This church has had both light and heat—heat enough to 
keep off the chill of doubt, and light enough to see to take the 
next step ahead. So that Unitarianism, as represented here 


34 


has been in the best sense a religious overflow, it has been a 
deepening of the wells of life, it has been a quickening of the 
power of action, the identification of life not with one aspect 
of it, but with the whole line of life-experience in the com- 
munity. 

I am glad to be identified with an occasion that registers 
the end of fifty years of entire accord between the worship- 
ping soul and the intellectual power of the period that is rep- 
resented. We live in an entirely different world to-night 
from that in which this church began. It has long ago ceased 
to be a reproach that we should be part of the advance move- 
ment of thought and feeling and purpose in the world. One 
aspect of the change that has come over the churches not of 
our own name I think is in some sort due to the stand that 
such churches as this have taken. The time was when to 
declare, as Mr. Chadwick did in his ‘‘Man Jesus,” for the 
essential and simple humanity of Jesus of Nazareth, filled 
with affright those who thought that reverence lay in a 
phrase and not in a thought, that devotion was in a set of 
words and not in the attitude of mind. But he kept steadily 
on his way, as others have had to do, sharing the feeling of 
Emerson when he declined to celebrate the sacrament of the 
Lord’s Supper in the Second Church in Boston in the sense 
in which the people desired who wished him toremain. ‘‘I 
should prefer,” he said, ‘‘to meet him”—that is, Jesus— 
‘upon terms of fellowship and friendship which would be 
more acceptable to me and endear him to me more,” or 
words to that effect. That was the attitude here. The real 
reverence was the insistence upon the simple humanity of 
Jesus. 

Great churches known as evangelical have come back 
from theories of Christ’s person to fellowship with his life. 
That great change has gone on in the evangelical churches, 
but we have never had to change our place beside the simple 
Man of Nazareth, the best man that e’er wore flesh about 
him. There we stood side by side with the brave Jesus of 
Nazareth and waited for him to win his way out of the mani- 
fold theories about him to the heart for which he longed and 
the heart that was hungry to accept him. 

These are only a few of the things in this brief time al- 


35 


lowed to me that I can speak of as part of the splendid 
achievement of a church like this. Stand firm, whether the 
tide is at its ebb or flood. Its ebb cannot destroy the founda- 
tions of thought, its flood cannot submerge the mounts of 
feeling. Stand firm in ebb and flood. 

There is an old elm beside where I live in the summer, a 
great elm with a head that has been flattened by the beating 
of storms. Limbs more protected have grown up and feath- 
ered out in fan-shaped foliage, expanding from the trunk 
like a great plume; but this old tree has stood there, I sup- 
pose, for two hundred years, and the storms have beat upon 
it, and the fishermen ’way out at sea have used it as a land- 
mark, and the children have been shaded under its expanding 
branches. It has been a landmark for landsmen and seamen. 
It is the one great object in the landscape as you look down 
the road or in from sea. The birds have nestled in it for 
two hundred years, and you can go and stand under it in the 
evening and hear them talking together in the branches as the 
evening falls, and its great shadow in the morning and even- 
ing sunshine has been cast upon the landscape. And it is 
there because it was a living thing that had power in itself 
to endure. That is a living church. It is not buttressed 
from the outside, it is not sustained and supported artificially, 
it has life in itself. Every new approach of thought finds its 
door open, every new emergency finds it on the road, every 
crisis in the community finds ittrue. And the church, happy 
with three such ministers as this church has had, has nothing 
to lament, but only to rejoice and thank God that it has held 
firmly to the integrity of reason and abandoned its soul to the 
task which God has put into its hands. 


Mr. CHapwick: There was Minot’s Light, upon the Mas- 
sachusetts coast. Well doIlremember its beam across the Bay 
when I wasa boy. There is a Minot’s Light in New York, 
and by its kindly beam how many a storm-tossed mariner 
these last twenty-five and thirty years has found his way to 
the haven where he would be! We hoped that light wouldshine 
awhile for us here this evening, but I am very sorry to say 
that Mr. Savage is not well enough to come. I hardly dared 
expect him, but when I met him a few weeks ago a hope 


36 


flamed up in his heart that he might come. Now, in his ab- 
sence, I ask his senior colleague, my old friend, Robert Coll- 
yer, to speak a few words to you, but in his own right, and no 
one has abetterhere. Hewasthe closest friend, ascloseas any 
brother, to Augustus Staples, my predecessor here. He has 
been very fatherly to me, and there is no moment of my min- 
istry that I remember better than one in its earliest stage, 
when he addressed to me one of the most pungent and per- 
sonal phrases that has ever been addressed to me by any man, 
saying, in a private letter: ‘‘ John, never count yourself sure 
of your position till you can dispense with the strongest man 
in your congregation.”” I have cherished that phrase for 
thirty-seven years. Now, Robert, will you speak a few words 
tous? You can’t say anything better than that, but we will 
take the best that you can give. 


REV. ROBERT, COLLYER: 


I sometimes tell the story of the old miller in our 
little town in Yorkshire who came to hear me preach the 
first time I tried. And he waylaid me on some week day soon 
after and said: ‘‘I came to hear you preach, laddie, Sun- 
day night.” Isaid: ‘‘ Yes; I think Isaw you.” ‘‘I want to 
tell thee what tho’s going to do in this world. They will 
mak’ a spare rail o’ thee and stick thee into every gap there 
is.” Despite the charming word my dear friend said just 
now about my own right and all the rest of it, lam that spare 
rail, all the same, not to fill the gap, but just to stop it, made 
by the sickness of my good associate, Mr. Savage. 

I remember some years ago sitting on the piazza at a 
summer hotel not far from Boston with an old Scotchman, 
and we fell to chatting and got a little tiny bit chummy. I 
liked him; he had a good face, and I found he was a good 
fellow, and so we told stories to each other touching our dif- 
ferent lives, and at last he said: ‘‘I would like to tell you a 
story that I think will interest you very much. I came to 
this country from Scotland when I was a big lad—growing 
up, ye ken—with my father and mother, and the family came 


37 


from a glen in the Highlands, and here we stayed, well down 
in New England, and I grew up to be a man, and I got mar- 
ried, and I prospered in my business, and when I got to be 
past seventy ’—he was past eighty then—‘‘I said: ‘I will go 
back to Scotland, into the old glen, and see the folks that are 
left.’ I could do it very well, I wanted to, my heart lay there 
the same, and away I went. But do you know, when I got to 
that glen there wasn’t a living soul that knew anything about 
my family—not one! I went to the hotel, inquired there. I 
went about and inquired; nobody knew the Campbells; they 
had all gone. There had been great changes in that region. 
And do you know, my heart was very heavy. I would fain 
have found somebody that ken us, that remembered us all 
that while ago; but there wasn’t a soul. At last I said to the 
landlord at the hotel: ‘Is there awoman about here anywhere 
of the name of Janet? I forget the second name, but the first 
name I remember.’ ‘Oh, yes!’ he said,‘she lives up the glen 
in such a house; she has lived there ever since we came here, 
and I suppose she has lived there always.’ I said: ‘I will go 
and see Janet.’ And I went up the glen and tapped at the 
door, and an old woman came out. I didn’t know her face at 
all, but the first thing she did was to throw up her hands and 
say, ‘John Campbell! is it thee? Come ben, John; come 
ben.’ And we sat down by the fireside and I said to her: 
‘Tell us hoo was it that thou kenned me when I didna ken 
thee at a’?? ‘Weel now, John,’ she said, ‘I will tell thee. 
Before thee went awa’ there was a little somethin’ between 
us, John. I think if thee had stayed we should have got 
marrit. But ye went awa’, and I never blamed ye, John, for 
not writin’ or comin’ to look me up. You couldn’t do that; 
but I never forgot ye, John. The heart has a long memory.’ 
‘Ah!’ I said, ‘Janet, Janet, that is so.’” 

And I thought it was such a sweet story. And it touched 
me to-night as I sat here thinking of the years that have gone 
since I first knew this church and its ministers. I havea kind 
of tiny personal connection with the first minister, Mr. Long- 
fellow. It is this, that the Longfellows came from the same 
small town that I left to come to this country—in which I 
lived for twelve years learning my trade and working at the 
forge—leaving our dead in the old church. They went for 

38 


225 years, or it may be 250 years, in the same old church 
where I went as a boy and young man, so I have that connec- 
tion with them, and that is all. I didn’t know the first minis- 
ter of this church when he was its minister, or for some little 
while after, but when I went to Chicago to take care of a 
mission there, and they set me preaching, and finally made me 
minister of a new church, one Sunday afternoon a young 
minister from Milwaukee came to church and spoke to me 
after church—he was with Mr. Brigham, who used to be at 
Taunton, where Mr. Forbes was formerly. They heard me 
preach and said something very nice after it was all over, and 
I took to Mr. Staples at once. And it happened a little while 
after, in the winter time, there was a great snow, and we had 
to go up to a town in Wisconsin north of Milwaukee. I had 
something to do, and Mr. Staples had to preach the sermon. 
Do you know, I never heard such a sermon in my life, so won- 
derful in its intuition of the truth and its inspiration. He 
poured out his soul over me. And then, when I got back to 
Chicago, I must sit down and write him and tell him what that 
sermon had done to me; what a wonder it was, what a joy it 
was; and rather intimated that possibly he did not understand 
what a great thing it was for him todo. I gota letter di- 
tectly from him full of joy. ‘‘Why, do you know,” he said, 
‘“‘T have been preaching here so long, and nobody has ever 
said sucha word to me, and I was getting sort of disheartened; 
but your letter has set me up, I feel as if there were some- 
thing I could do.” 

From that time we became very intimate indeed and used 
to exchange letters once a week or once amonth. It was 
wonderful how nearly our minds ran together in the burning 
questions we had to discuss, he in his masterly fashion and I 
the best I could. We used to tell each other also anything 
that occurred that we thought would be of special interest of 
any sort. An old gentleman came to the little church that 
was started then, of some eminence, but he was not quite right 
in his mind, and he went quite crazy, but he wouldn’t let any- 
body come to his house to look after him, not his sons or 
friends, except myself, so I had to go and stay with him nearly 
two weeks; then it was ordered he should be taken to Hart- 
ford, and I went with him, and came back, and his sons gave 


39 


me what was avery large sum of money, and what should I 
do but go right away to the jeweler’s and buy a gold watch. 
I always coveted a gold watch. And what should I do but 
write to Mr. Staples right away, telling of old Solomon, of my 
great good fortune and of the gold watch. He wrote back, 
‘“‘Dear Brother Collyer, my sermons never drive anybody 
crazy; I guess I shall have to keep on with my old silver watch 
to the end of time.” He was one of the most delightful com- 
trades I ever had in all this world. We were together a great 
deal during the summer of 1861. I saw a great deal of him. 
And he was called to this church to be the minister. He 
wrote to me about it, and of course I encouraged him. He 
wasn’t happy in Wisconsin, in Milwaukee. They didn’t know 
their man, didn’t understand him, didn’t know what a joy it 
was to hear such a man preach. And so he came down here. 
And from that time I began to know something about what 
was then called ‘‘ New Chapel,” that is, this church. So our 
hearts knitted together. But it was not in the finite order of 
life he should live. He began to droop. He did some grand 
work here before then. He took the heart of this church and 
he held it. And then the time came when he must leave it. 
I came down when he was so very sick, near to his end. And 
I was with him when he died. And I went with the friends 
down to Mendon, where he was buried, and came back and 
preached some sort of memorial the Sunday after. And that 
was the end of the beautiful, but oh, so brief, ministry of 
Augustus Staples in this church! 

And then my memory touches much—heart memories, all 
of them—the time when your dear minister came to you. I 
came down by his invitation, and possibly the invitation of 
the church also, and preached the sermon of his installation. 
Oh, how proud I was to do that, you know, and find him—as 
you found him, the elders of this church—the man after your 
own heart, and the man after God’s own heart, if I know any- 
thing about it, who has been with you through all these years 
and done his work and grown in grace and in the knowledge of 
the truth, and preached sermons that have gone far and wide 
through the world, and sung songs that have gone far and 
wide through the world, of which I plot and plan all along the 
line of my own ministry to use one on a Sunday when I pos- 

40 


sibly can. And at funerals I repeat, and it does me good and 
does everybody good: 


“Tt singeth low in every heart, 
We hear it each and all— 
A song of those who answer not, 
However we may call.” 


Now, I could stand here going on for an hour and talk 
about all this; of my pride and joy in the man I used to call 
my son, for love’s saake—but he has grown now so mature I 
don’t use the word any more, he seems to have got beyond it. 
Indeed, I don’t quite like to tell him about things I have been 
hearing and reading, for fear he will pick me up and set me 
right, as James Russell Lowell used to. I used to think of 
our minister at Taunton, Mr. Brigham, as the man who knew 
more than the whole Unitarian denomination put together of 
what was in books, and so forth. I think the same thing 
about my brother John—lI call him brother now. And so I am 
glad to meet you here to-night and say this word out of 
my heart. My heart also ‘‘has a long memory,” and it holds 
these men. He said possibly there may be some way open by 
which Brother Camp can come to-night. SolI think and 
trust there may be some way open by which Brother Staples 
also can come to-night, and Brother Longfellow, and we will 
be all together. They are here if we feel the pulse of love 
in our hearts for them, as I know we do. And what shall I 
say more or better than this: that God may bless this church 
through fifty years to come, as He has blessed it in the fifty 
years that have gone, and give it ministers as faithful and as 
true and as brave and as radiant as those that have ministered 
at the altar and in the pulpit since the church began. 


Mr. Cuapwickx: We are the oldest daughter of the First 
Unitarian Church in Brooklyn, the Church of the Saviour. 
What relation does that make me to Mr. Forbes? He is at 
least my friend, andI am his. He will speak for his Society 
and for himself, first reading one or two of the many letters 
of congratulation we have received. 


REV. JOHN P. FORBES: 


It gives me great pleasure before speaking a few 
words to you in my own person to read two letters. One 
41 


from Dr. Alfred P. Putnam, who was for many years min- 
ister of the First Church, and the other from Dr. Horatio 
Stebbins, who has been for so many years minister of the 
Church Universal. Iam very glad that a predecessor of mine 
should have written Dr. Putnam’s letter. 

My friends [after reading Dr. Stebbins’s letter], itis not 
exactly descending from the sublime to the ridiculous to come 
from the level of that letter down to the level of the few 
words I have to address to you this evening; nevertheless, 
it isa descent. My errand here to-night is chiefly that of a 
messenger, a messenger of hearty good will. I bring to you 
the loving greetings and warm felicitations of the mother 
church. A very young mother, only nine years old when 
you came forth, spirit of her spirit, and not well versed, it may 
be, in the duties of motherhood, but she has never yet been 
ashamed of her offspring. I would not have you think, how- 
ever, that I have no personal interest in this occasion. When 
your minister extended to me the right hand of fellowship at 
the time I was called to the First Church, I did not realize 
how, in becoming minister of that church, the mother of this, 
I was also becoming your minister’s spiritual father, but he un- 
derstood all about that, and hence, I suppose, the warmth of his 
greeting. Now, the least I can do to-night is to applaud his 
discernment and good judgment, and promise that I will be 
faithful to my trust, although I am not prepared to accept 
unlimited responsibility. 

As I look abroad over our churches and consider the rela- 
tions between them it seems to me that I detect an ever-wid- 
ening and deepening fellowship. Those words, ‘‘radical”’ 
and ‘‘ conservative,’ which formerly saluted our ears on every 
occasion, no longer sound upon the air. We hear very little 
about Jew or Gentile, or ‘‘my creed” and ‘‘thine.” In all 
the churches truth is the watchword and righteousness the 
end of our endeavor, while the sentiment that includes all is 
the sentiment of brotherhood. 

Intimately associated with this church, of course, I have 
never been, but it has been my privilege to know two of your 
ministers, Samuel Longfellow slightly, and your present 
teacher and shepherd pretty well. Of Samuel Longfellow a 
former parishioner once said, ‘‘ His feet were on the ground, 


42 


but his head was always in the clouds.” Of course this re- 
mark was not intended to convey the impression that Mr. 
Longfellow was a sentimentalist, or that he was the victim of 
a feeble other-worldliness. It was intended to set forth the 
spirituality of his teaching and the quality of his manhood. 
His broad and open, practical wisdom, I take it, was demonstrat- 
ed whenever there wasa good cause that lacked assistance, or a 
wrong that needed resistance, and the stamp of the positive 
and constructive individuality was to be seen upon all the 
work he undertook. He belonged to that little group of men 
called, I think sometimes rather vaguely, Transcendentalists. 
That word Transcendentalist isa very tall word, but very few of 
us, so far as I know, have climbed to the top of it. These 
men, if I understand their position, stood for the idea that 
nothing, neither ecclesiastical authority nor Scriptural infalli- 
bility, neither idealist nor materialist, neither powers nor 
principalities, could come between the human soul and God. 
This idea may have made them somewhat mystical in their 
preaching, somewhat unconventional in their conduct, but it 
made them also spiritual in their teaching and sublimely sin- 
cere in their daily living. 

A single anecdote of Samuel Longfellow I want to re- 
hearse to you, trusting to your kind indulgence to overlook, 
or better still, forget, its personal bias. Mr. Longfellow was 
living in retirement in Cambridge and I wasa student in 
Harvard Divinity School. The Ministerial Association, an 
organization of ministers in and around Boston, invited Mr. 
Longfellow to read a paper before them, and the divinity 
students were invited to be present. The meeting was held 
in the old Hollis Street Church, even then fragrant with the 
memory of Starr King. Mr. Longfellow chose for his sub- 
ject ‘‘ Truth ’”’—Truth from the philosophical and theological 
point of view. There was nothing particularly striking in his 
presentation of his theme, but when he came to the practical 
application, which isalways the portion of real value in any 
address, ah, then, every relation of life was illuminated, 
every duty of life was intensified. That man’s word pierced 
through to the very centre of every refuge of deceit and lies. 
It seemed to us young fellows as though our whole hearts 
were opened wide to his reading. Well, that afternoon when 


43 


I tramped back over the Long Bridge to Cambridge it seemed 
as though I trod upon air; and other men felt asI did. And 
that night when we turned away from our ethical text-book, 
or our own dear Everett’s ‘‘ Science of Thought,” and turned 
out the lights, there came to more than one of us, like a bene- 
diction that follows after prayer, the thought of that slight, 
gentle, intense man with his spiritual message, and I can 
readily believe that more than one man that night gave ‘‘ bonds 
of secret tears’ to live his life after a nobler, worthier fashion. 
I wonder if you know—yes, I believe you do know—what a 
privilege it is to have had such a man for a minister, if only 
for a few years. 

It was in my mind to speak just a word about Samuel Long- 
fellow’s hymns, but the rights of those who are to come after 
me forbid that I should enter upon that theme. Let me just 
say that such outpourings of noble thought and tender senti- 
ment as ‘‘O Life That Maketh All Things New,” ‘‘ Now on 
Sea and Land Descending,” ‘‘O God! Unseen, But Ever 
Near,” ‘‘God of Ages and of Nations,” ‘‘One Holy Church 
of God Appears,” ‘‘ Now When We Sing Our Parting Song,” 
must always remain treasures, not only of our Unitarian the- 
ology, but of the hymnology of Christendom. 

And now, in my closing word, I must trench just a little 
on forbidden ground. When your minister asked me to be 
present here to-night to speak a word, he said: ‘‘It is the 
Society’s anniversary; you will say nothing about me,” and I, 
responding at once in my own feeling to his modesty, said, 
‘‘Of course not.” But what are you going to do when a 
church has had fifty years of organized life, and thirty-seven 
of those years have been spent under the ministration of 
one man? What else can you do but say something about the 
ministry of that man? And I only trust, my dear friend, that 
the sincerity of my speech will be a hedge around your 
modesty. 

Mr. Longfellow set in golden letters over the entrance to 
this church your motto, ‘‘The Truth shall make you free.” 
You who are gathered here to-night in all love and loyalty 
know whether the spirit of that motto has been cherished and 
honored in the past thirty-seven years. You know, too, of 
the relations of esteem and affection that have existed, warm 


44 


and tender, between minister and people—the hopes, the 
comforts, the helps, the confidences, the testimonies of word 
and act that lie too deep for speech. Let no word of mine 
intrude upon these sacred themes. But I welcome the oppor- 
tunity to speak just a word of appreciation, not only for my- 
self, but for the great number of our younger ministers who 
have been strengthened and encouraged by the patient and 
accurate scholarship, the noble preaching and the manly, 
straightforward life of the minister of the Second Church in 
Brooklyn. Many a David turning away from the armor and 
sword of Saul, yet hardly daring to trust his own weapon, it 
seemed so feeble and inadequate, has found faith in himself 
and courage to go forward because of your minister’s printed 
page. 

And now, dear friends, sitting here together in this glad 
hour, thankful for all of good the past has held, yet looking 
forward hopefully and expectantly to the future, believing 
that good to-morrow must follow good to-day, we can do no 
better than repeat that beautiful hymn which Mr. Chadwick 
wrote for his graduation from the Divinity School into the 
work of the ministry: 


‘‘ Eternal Ruler of the ceaseless round 
Of circling planets singing on their way; 
Guide of the nations from the night profound 
Into the glory of the perfect day; 
Rule in our hearts, that we may ever be 
Guided, and strengthened, and upheld by Thee. 


‘“‘ We would be one in hatred of all wrong, 
One in our love of all things sweet and fair, 
One with the joy that breaketh into song, 
One with the grief that trembles into prayer, 
One in the power that makes Thy children free 
To follow truth, and thus to follow Thee.” 


Mr. Cuapwick: I shall certainly feel happier, and I 
know my people and all the friends here will, if Mr. Wilson 
speaks a few words to us from his own heart and as repre- 
senting Unity Church, so dear to us in many ways, not least 
because it was so loved by Stephen Camp, who is with us 
here to-night if there is any skyey roadway from his world to 
this. 

45 


REV. DANIEL M. WILSON: 


I feel some measure of humiliation that I was not 
here in time to take the part that was assigned me, but 
Mr. Chadwick is to blame. Early in the evening, when I 
was minded to come here I recalled that I had in my library 
a printed copy of the Twenty-fifth Anniversary celebration of 
this Society. I sought it and began to read it, and found it so 
absorbing that in a short while I was so lost as to be entirely 
buried, and so came late to this meeting. If he succeeded 
this morning in presenting a discourse so able as that was, as 
I have no doubt he did, it is evidence of the innate ability 
and wide culture and fitting way in which he puts all things. 
And he has been growing from that day to this, and has 
been giving, not to this congregation alone, but to a wide 
class of hearers and readers, sermons that have set them 
thinking, and have fed the deepest sources of their being, and 
have led them on to wider and larger life. 

I recall that I wrote to Mr. Chadwick that some churches 
of our denomination were known by their corporate name, the 
First Church of this place or that; or they were known by 
the material of which they were built, the Brick Church or 
the Stone Church. Other churches are known by the men 
who have preached in them. I recall to mind thatthe church 
in Braintree, which was a neighboring church to Quincy, 
where I was long settled, was known and is known to-day as 
Dr. Storr’s Church; old Dr. Storrs preached there fifty years 
ago, and still the church goes by his name. His son preached 
here in Brooklyn, and the church is still known by his name. 
The church in which Henry Ward Beecher preached is still 
known by his name, though men so able have succeeded him. 

And this church, the Second Unitarian Church of Brook- 
lyn, is more commonly known throughout our denomination 
as Mr. Chadwick’s church. He has made it what it is, a 
church from which has emanated wise words; in which has 
been exemplified the clearest freedom, and in which also 
there has been given to the world the ripest scholarship. We 
cannot help speaking about Mr. Chadwick. We know how 
you have backed him up in what he has said, in his courage 
and his freedom. But Mr. Chadwick stands as the repre- 

46 


sentative of this church, and further as representing the church 
of this day, and he speaks a word that is always clear and 
rings true.* 

I bring the greetings of Unity Church—not the youngest 
of the Unitarian churches, because the Flatbush Church has 
lately come into existence, but the youngest of those repre- 
‘sented here on the Twenty-fifth Anniversary to render its 
congratulations, and it does so now. 


Mr. Cuapwick: Two aspects of my life have been very 
‘satisfactory to me: One, my relation to the older men in our 
ministry, Furness, Dewey, Bellows, Hedge and others, when 
I was a young man; and the other, my relation to the younger 
men as I am looking toward sunset and starting on the 
descending grade. With no one I may truly say has this re- 
lation been more delightful and inspiring than with Mr. 
Wright. It is getting late, but you will not think of that 
while he forecasts for us the future, which has been germinal 
in our past and is budding in our present life. 


REV. MERLE ST. C. WRIGHT: 


I seem to be like the lash or the snapper, I might 
almost say the ornamental tassel, on the long whip that 
has been flicking over your backs this evening. I am not 
sure that I shall not be like the end of that line of the boys’ 
game of ‘‘Snap the whip,” and come tumbling down among 
you, considering the amount I have had to feel and think in 
listening to the addresses this evening. 

My subject is ‘‘The Prospect.” The most interesting 
prospect at present for me is that of this audience and church 
and its historic duration, and of the long and honorable term 
which its present minister has fulfilled. This church is fifty 
years old, mine fifteen. Mr. Chadwick has been here thirty- 
seven years, I there thirteen. But the point is this: This is 
his only parish and that is mine, and I am wondering if I can 
stick it out and it can stick me out so long as you and he 
have. That is the interesting thing. 

* Here followed a story very creditable to Mr. Chadwick, which is omitted because 
the actual hero of it must have been some other man. 


47 


Another interesting prospect is that it looks as if he 
would last another thirteen years and that we should cele- 
brate his golden wedding. And if he lasts I know you will, 
so that is a bright thought. That puts a great deal of 
responsibility on me and mine, but we are feeling your pulse, 
anxiously inquiring about your health, and keeping step with 
you as well as we can. If we can’t think of anything else to 
say up there we repeat what is said here, and it all goes. 

I wish I could speak to you in the historic strain these 
gentlemen have adopted about your previous pastors and their 
experiences. I really could if Ishouldtry. When I was in Har- 
vard College, I think about twenty-four years ago, Samuel Long- 
fellow was one of the visitors tomy room. My college chum 
was a dear friend of his, and he used to come to see us two, 
quietly and privately. He was a simple gentleman of whom 
we expected no particular power or experience, but he always 
left the room filled with a kind of white light, because, like 
his brother, he, too, was a ‘‘ White Mr. Longfellow;” a virile 
spirit, if there ever was one, a saint who had sanctity of mind 
as well as of soul, who looked to the very root of truth, but 
always unfolded for you its blossom. He was one of the wise 
men of all time, it seems to me, and I speak from my ma- 
turity and from the study of his published works. As to 
the character of the man, greater than anything he ever 
uttered or anything he ever did was the man he always 
was. 

Then in your present pastor’s case—for we are all drop- 
ping into garrulity in this direction—I love to see a man who 
vindicates the dignity of the province of the intellect in pulpit 
speech, who represents the calm completion of acknowledged 
conscience in public as well as in private affairs. I love to 
see a man who can speak with the accumulated wisdom of 
half a century’s experience upon the inward things of life in 
terms that reveal them even to professed students; who can 
sift and search the spirit, as he has, and who can sing the 
songs he does, and who can turn the searchlight, mounted on 
his heroic headpiece, over the centuries, and give us its story, 
revealing its inherent meaning. It is a grand, great thing, 
and I congratulate you as to his ministry at large in the 
world; and his fellow ministers around him feed upon him, 


48 


yet he ever is renewed as they are fed. I congratulate you 
upon the splendid fellowship with such a mind and life. 

I have another connection with this church, which is that 
one of our most esteemed parishioners was one of your 
original members. He went from you to Frothingham, from 
Mr. Frothingham to me, and he is one of those spiritual con- 
duits, one of those electric connections, wherewith I am sup- 
plied and whereby I burn with a consuming joy until this 
day. 

I am to speak to you on ‘‘The Prospect” for a little 
while. What is the prospect? I say the prospect is serene, 
the prospect is fine. About the worst thing I see in the 
prospect are some dead or indifferent and torpid Unitarians, 
but everything else is all right. The faith is all right, the 
future is all right. We are getting elementary agencies as 
our allies on every hand. The trouble is we are so used to 
being waited upon by all these public servants we don’t 
bestir ourselves at all, and there is danger as of those who sit 
in the midst of wealth—that we shall dwindle while they in- 
crease. 

We have been vindicated on the lines that our fore- 
fathers chose. Orthodoxy is imperiled and enfeebled with 
the widening of the suns, and its thought is coming to occupy 
our position. It can’t help it, because Unitarianism long ago 
squarely identified itself with the natural reason and the free 
conscience and unfolded soul in every department of think- 
ing, feeling, and living. There is not atrammel on us of doc- 
trine or polity, nothing that hinders us except our own inef- 
fectualness and impotence. We area free people, and they 
can but come into our freedom; they cannot enlarge the 
bounds of our freedom. Now, if orthodoxy has reached the 
limit of Unitarian truth along those ancient lines, all hail to 
it and God-speed to it. Do you think it has? Do you think 
we have finished our task in those directions? Possibly we 
may have, but it is a restless, yearning, unsatisfied, strug- 
gling, hungry and ignorant world in spiritual things as I 
know it and see it, and there is very much to be done there 
yet. 

But turn onward and outward and forward to the future 
and see what science is doing for us. It has unfolded a uni- 


49 


verse and made us for the first time understand what such 
great terms as ‘‘infinite” and ‘‘eternal” mean; what ‘‘en- 
ergy ’’ means when put into picturesque statement and illu- 
minated by the imagination. 

When we traverse the regions of astronomy, when we 
move through the field of light and thrill with the swiftness of 
its vibration; when we go back into geological ages and grow 
up again with the world as children together; when we un- 
derstand the marvelous shaping of this great, beautiful and 
blessed earth on which we stand, then are we thrilled with 
psalm, then are we attuned to prophecy, then do we settle 
into prayer, then do we rise to action with a power that the 
world could never confer before. When we look into the life 
of things, whether animal or vegetable, what exquisite beau- 
ties, what delicate adaptation, what myriad and marvelous 
mechanisms are there disclosed! 

When we trace man’s long and timid career in early 
efforts at society, at morality, at religion, at science, what a 
wonderful panorama! How we throb and pulse with him in 
his new surprises and his latest discoveries! And all this is 
but the noon of science. And what has it done? It has un- 
folded the volume of the world, entertained us with its 
miniatures and pictures, made it a real thing to us, taught 
us that it is filled with mind and throbbing with life and ani- 
mated with purpose as well as with power, with spirit as well 
as with purpose, that leads on to perfection, as we personally, 
in our own experience, are aware. 

What is philosophy doing for us? Philosophy has solidi- 
fied this universe as the Romans solidified the world in their 
one government. We know to-day that in philosophy what 
we have got to believe, if we are going to believe anything, 
is that the universe is a single system. Now it is a system 
whose forces are convertible; you can begin at the bottom 
and say it is matter all through, or you can take it at the top 
and say it is spirit all through, but matter won’t solve it 
and spirit will solve it. And philosophy says it is spirit all 
through, one single, thrilling system of mental life. And 
that is enough. That again gives a giant’s power to 
religion. 

And take ethics. There was a time when ethics could 


5° 


all be written in precepts, when it was a kind of individual 
cook book—if you wanted anything you got the recipe and 
dressed it up. Now nothing is traditional or conventional, 
nothing is so simple, it is all complicated. Even in personal 
life we have to be original and make our own discoveries and 
ventures. 

But take ethics in business, take ethics in the relation of 
law to the delicate and subtle questions of the day; in the 
relation of diplomacy and international policy throughout 
the world; and there never was such a call for acumen in 
ethics, for intuition of moral truth, for superb self-sufficiency 
in ethical judgment—one man against a world of evil custom 
—as there is to-day. Ethics in relation to science fighting for 
its life, and ethics in relation to art fighting for principle and 
purpose, gaining dignity and decency everywhere, are not 
these splendid opportunities forthe modern interpreter ? He 
is not to tell you to be good, but to tell you how to be good, 
what to do to be good, and to point the truth andsendit home 
to you, to let you see in detail, and not in broad, fine generaliza- 
tion, what your duty is. He has to knowit and feel it, and 
make you know it and feel it. It has to shine from him as 
heat and light from white-hot steel. And it is no light task 
for him, and it is no light task for you. It is a privilege, but 
also an obligation of great weight and responsibility. It is 
something new, and it is as large, compared with the ancient 
ethics, as the new heavens are compared with the star-spangled 
dome of prehistoric times. 

Now, to sum up and not to take too much of your time, 
what has Unitarianism stood for and what does it stand for 
to-day in increased measure? Now, surely it was born ra- 
tional; it was not wholly informed, but it was born rational. 
It attained ideals in its earliest manhood which it does not 
need to abandon now, and which require all the courage and 
comprehension it possesses. It has led in thought, and it has 
endeavored to apply its thought to life. 

Channing made usthe great challenge. He said it ought 
to be the leading trait of a Unitarian, his distinguishing 
mark, his specific characteristic, that he labor with all his 
powers to elevate and educate the oppressed classes of what- 
soever condition. He said it ought to be given in all 


51 


our auxiliary institutions, ought to be the main business of 
our Association—to undertake this redemption of man in his 
intellectual, moral, spiritual and religious nature. He said 
we should brightly and conspicuously wear that stamp, that 
our task is nothing less than the regeneration of the world. 
Theodore Parker was identified with that thought and that 
movement in theology, which now has moved all theology up 
to his fighting line. These are rare privileges to possess as 
our inheritance; they are a summons to the destiny which we 
are to go on to and reap. 

And now what is the word of the age in regard to religion? 
This idea easily sums itself up into three things: This is an 
age of scientific advance, of historical criticism, which is 
another branch of science; of humanitarian effort, and of 
individual perfection, which task is always with us. The 
great teachers on every side seek to welcome and develop 
science, that is one great thing—our duty toward Nature. 
To promote the schemes of social emancipation, that is 
another great thing—our duty toward man in outward rela- 
tions and in developing spirituality, not in morbidness and 
mawkishness, but the manhood of man, the manliest thing in 
man, that is our task always set for us as individuals or per- 
sons. This is the appeal of the future tous. It comes in 
the shape of a new social spirit that is now laid upon us, and, 
as Cadmus sowed the dragon’s teeth and men sprang up, so 
are champions springing up in every section of the world 
pledged to settle the rights of man, to teach him his privi- 
leges, to train him to his duties, to lead him into his deliver- 
ance. That, I believe, is the work of the twentieth century— 
that man of every class shall be given his rights, and his first 
tight is to live a human life, and then this shall be extended 
to beneficent and just relationships of nations toward one 
another, and then will the task of the century on which we 
are entering not only be outlined but achieved. ‘This is the 
future for us: to accept and promote science and apply it to 
the ethical and spiritual life, to identify ourselves with social 
causes wherever apparent and bring them to their full, com- 
plete fruition in all just expression, and consecrate ourselves to 
that form of spiritual religion without which these words are 
cankered in blossom and wormeaten at the root, but with 


52 


which the strength of God flows through them and keeps the 
truth forever green. 


Mr. CHapDwick: 


‘* Now let the curtain fall. 
We better know than all 
How little we have gained, 
How vast the unattained.” 


The evening’s situation reminds me of a story told by 
Mr. Washington about an old colored man who went down 
from Virginia to Alabama with some of his relatives. Mr. 
Washington asked him how many there were of them, and he 
.said, ‘‘Me and my brother and two mules.” I do not wish 
to reflect upon the personal character of my friends, but I 
will say that some of them have shown a certain obstinacy in 
their refusal to conduct their remarks this evening upon the 
lines which I laid down for them in advance. As expressions 
of their affection their words have been music in my ears. 
As statements of fact, so far as I am concerned, they might 
have been less liberal and more exact. But when Mr. Curtis 
thought himself overpraised for anything he had done, he 
used to say to his friend, Charles Eliot Norton, ‘‘ Well, 
Charles, we must try hard to deserve all this.” So I will say, 
‘‘Well, John, and Robert, and Thomas, and Daniel, and 
Merle, I must try to deserve the good things you have said 
of me to-night.” 

Especially do I thank these gentlemen for the good praise 
they have given tomy people. But the grand defect of all 
their speech has been that they did not give them half or 
quarter of the credit they deserve. Even the little good that 
I have done has been made possible by their loyalty, their 
unwavering fidelity to me and mine. We shall go on a little 
while longer together, the cloud of witnesses, thick as the 
angel faces around Raphael’s loveliest Madonna, encouraging 
pastor and people to ‘‘lay aside every weight and run with 
patience the race set before us.” 

‘‘ From the eternal shadow, rounding 
All our sun and starlight here, 
Voices of our loved ones sounding 
Bid us be of heart and cheer; 


Through the silence, down the spaces, 
Falling on the inward ear. 


53 


“Let us draw their mantles o’er us 
Which have fallen in our way, 
Let us do the work before us 
Bravely, cheerily, while we may, 
Ere the long night silence cometh 
And with us it is not day.” 


CHOIR: “Be Thou Exalted.”—JBayley, 


HYMN. Tune: Hummel. 


One holy Church of God appears 
Through every age and race, 
Unwasted by the lapse of years, 

Unchanged by changing place. 


From oldest time, on farthest shores, 
Beneath the pine or palm, 

One unseen presence she adores 
With silence or with psalm. 


Her priests are all God’s faithful sons, 
To serve the world raised up; 

The pure in heart, her baptized ones, 
Love her communion cup. 


The truth is her prophetic gift, 
The soul her sacred page; 

And feet on mercy’s errands swift 
Do make her pilgrimage. 


O living Church, thine errand speed; 
Fulfil thy task sublime; 
With bread of life earth’s hunger feed; 
Redeem the evil time! 
—Samuel Longfellow. 


BENEDICTION. 


54 


LETTERS. 


The following letters are selected somewhat arbitrarily 
from a larger number that were sent to Mr. Chadwick, or, 
through him, to the Society: 


zo ELMWooD AVE., CAMBRIDGE, April 9, 1gor. 


My Dear Chadwick: 


I salute you, and if it is not assuming too much, I salute 
the church that celebrates its Fiftieth Anniversary. Iam the 
more confident and bold in this my congratulation because 
the church in its very earliest days invited me to become 
their minister, when events and circumstances compelled me 
to decline, and thus in the order of time and Providence to 
give place to you. 

The ministers of your church have been unique men, of 
fine personal independence, spiritual experience and insight, 
poets and prophets. 

The late Samuel Longfellow was one of the most inter- 
esting persons I ever knew—in whom clear spiritual vision 
vindicated faith, the existence of which is evidence of things 
unseen. 

I salute you, my dear Chadwick. Your ministry has 
been unique and characteristic, and altogether worthy of you; 
you have spoken from the level plain of your mind, from its 
valleys of mystery and shadows, and from the heaven-pierc- 
ing summits of poetic thought and imagination; from foun- 
tains inexhaustible you have poured forth streams mingled of 
philosophy, morals, religion and poetry, that have made 
many desert places of thought bloom into beauty, and en- 
tiched many minds. You have a kind of chemical affinity 
for truth that is the only true ground for independence of 


55 


mind, and your intellect is as honest as your conscience.’ 
Such are the sentiments which I have entertained for you 
through all these years of your ministry; some things which 
you have done are perpetual—the song which you have set 
to the tune of ‘‘ Auld Lang Syne”’ will struggle in the human 
heart as long as emotions of sorrow, love and gratitude are 
the expression of the profoundest realities of our being, and 
the poem ‘‘ My Father’s Quadrant” will guide men across the 
trackless seas when the creeds will have crumbled and fallen 
in ruins, the hiding-place of the bats, the owls and the foxes 
of old superstitions. 

There are some aspects of our life and experience around 
which there gathers the melancholy of disappointment, and 
what we are does not correspond with what we feel we might 
have been, but the truly noble mind rises above all despond- 
ency, and we take ourselves for what we are and lean our 
human heart upon the Eternal Love. 

Yours really, 
Horatio STEBBINS. 


SALEM, Mass., April 12, 1gor. 
My Dear Brother Chadwick: 

I received to-day the programme for your Fiftieth Anni- 
versary and thank you heartily for thus keeping me in your 
kind remembrance. It is to be a marked day indeed for 
our churches in Brooklyn. How I wish I could be there and 
join with the old friends and new in the interesting occasion! 
What able, earnest and devoted ministers your church has had, 
and what a wealth of pure and beautiful sacred songs two of 
them, at least, have given to the Church Universal! I con- 
gratulate you on your long and faithful ministry, and send my 
love to your dear people, and give it abundantly to you and 


yours. Ever faithfully, 
A. P. PuTNaAM. 


2427 CHANNING Way, BERKELEY, CAL., April 8, 1901. 


Dear Chadwick: 
I wish I could be present at the jubilee of the Second Uni- 
tarian Society next Sunday in response to your note, just re- 
56 


ceived. I know that an honored past and a no less honorable 
present will combine to make the occasion one of high thought 
and inspiring fellowship, this last reaching within the veil. I 
congratulate the Society; I congratulate its minister whose 
service with his people covers three-quarters of the half-cen- 
tury, and whose ministry beyond his immediate congregation, 
through his printed word, read and sung, has been wider than 


he can know. 
Sincerely yours, 


F. L. Hosmer. 


SouTH CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH, BROOKLYN, N. Y., April 12, 1901. 


My Dear Dr. Chadwick: 


On behalf of the South Congregational Church as well as 
for myself I would acknowledge most heartily the fraternal 
and neighborly courtesy of your recent note of salutation to 
us upon the occasion of our recent Fiftieth Church Anniver- 
sary, almost coincident in time with the similar glad occasion 
in the history of your own honored Society. Let me give you 
**a Roland for an Oliver,” in the same fine, fraternal fashion 
which now, thank God! has taken the place of the ancient 
acrimony, and therefore mutual misjudgment, of theological 
debate. 

We of the South Church, your neighbors and friends, con- 
gratulate you and your people upon the completion of this 
your strenuous and successful half-century. We congratulate 
you personally upon your brilliant and noble record of thirty- 
seven years of continuous pulpit and pastoral service, and we 
lift our prayers to God—our common Father—that the happy 
auspices, both personal and public, under which you celebrate 
this your approaching Golden Jubilee, may herald and insure 
many, many years still to come of prosperity and blessing 
in those efforts for the causes of truth and justice among men, 
which, however our particular methods differ, still and always 
make brothers of us all. 

‘Faithfully yours, 
ALBERT T. Lyman. 


57 


tor WILSON STREET, BROOKLYN, N. Y., April 15, 1901. 


My Dear Mr. Chadwick: 


I am deeply disappointed that I could not be at your 
services last evening, and that a previous engagement from 
which I find it impossible to extricate myself will keep me 
from your home to-morrow evening. But I want to assure 
you of my hearty congratulations and my very best wishes 
for you and yours. It is amost happy anniversary, in which 
you will reap the fruits of long fidelity and noble sacrifices. » 
May you and your people derive some returns for your pioneer 
work in this still howling wilderness of mingled worldliness and 
orthodoxy, from the sentiments expressed by those who have 
been the gainers by your works. And may you personally, 
with Mrs. Chadwick, long be spared to Brooklyn, and Brook- 
lyn to you. May God bless you! 

Ever sincerely yours, 
Joun CoLemMan ADAMS. 


New York, April 26, gor. 
Dear Brother Chadwick: 


Gladly at this time do I bear my witness to the value of 
your services as an advocate of the freedom of the human 
mind and the worship of truth in the soul’s highest concern— 
the relation to the Infinite. No better proof of my apprecia- 
tion could I give than the fact that from the day of our first 
acquaintance to this (more than twenty years lie between the 
two points), not a line of your printed utterances, in sermon 
or book, have I left unread, if they came within my reach; 
and I did read, not ‘‘as one who runs,” but as one who de- 
sires to enter into spiritual communion with the speaker, that 
he may ‘‘hear, learn and inwardly digest” any message the 
words were intended to convey. That my love for the 
speaker had a share in this desire I will not deny; but it 
would not have been sufficient to carry one through so many 
years had I not been at the same time convinced that John’s 
Apostleship always deserves the open ear and attentive mind. 
To say, however, that I always said ‘‘/a und Amen” to your 
conclusions would be rank flattery. On the contrary, not 

58 


seldom I stamped my foot on the ground (a bad habit of mine 
which I am now too old to change), crying, in tones not quite 
inaudible: ‘‘ Pity he wrote this down; I wish I had him here to 
argue the point with him!’ But—dissent never created a 
feeling of distance, and so, I trust, it will remain even to the 
end between us. To all human calculations many years of 
unimpaired usefulness are still before you, which, I am confi- 
dent, will be marked by the same breadth of thought and 
good will toward all men which breathes through your work 
in the past. God has placed you among a people who know 
their leader and follow him willingly, and with your heart 
planted and nourished in a blessed home, the new period 
opens under conditions that make all your friends and well- 
wishers of the cause of light and peace among men to rejoice, 
and among them, I am fully assured, you number 
Yours, in brotherly affection, 
G. GOTTHEIL. 


UNITARIAN CONFERENCE OF THE MIDDLE STATES AND CANADA. 


New York, N. Y., April 13, 1901. 
Dear Mr. Chadwick: 

To what an interesting event you invite me! A semi- 
centennial of any church stirs in me more than a common in- 
terest. I presume this is because of my acquaintance with 
every step by the way which many of our young churches 
have taken. I have never organized one of these humanizing 
institutions without a devout hope that it will survive all the 
storms and become an efficient and honored power for good 
in the community. This the Second Unitarian Church, in 
Brooklyn, has done in an eminent degree. And what a rich 
history it has had! I send you my hearty congratulations 
and felicitations over the completion of this first half-century 
in the history of your church, which has been, from the be- 
ginning, marked by the very exceptional character of its 
ministry. I know of no church in which it has been sur- 
passed and few in which it has been equaled. It rarely falls 
to the lot of any church to be served consecutively by three 
such ministers as have filled the pastorate of your church— 


59 


Longfellow, Staples and Chadwick. How much do those 
names signify in our denominational history! What an hon- 
orable distinction do they confer upon the church thus suc- 
cessively served! The high spiritual quality of Longfellow’s 
ministry is known and honored among all our churches. His 
hymns have enriched the hymnology of all churches. The 
moral earnestness and enthusiasm of Staples’s ministry is one 
of the most cherished traditions of your church, while your 
own work as poet, preacher, biographical writer and literary 
critic during your long pastorate of thirty-seven years is so 
widely known and so heartily appreciated as to have made 
the Second Unitarian Church famous wherever rational 
thought and spiritual religion are known. 

Surely with such a splendid history as this your church 
merits the warmest appreciation and the heartiest congratu- 
lations of all who are in accord with the best and ripest 
thought of the age in all matters pertaining to religion. 
Please accept for yourself and your church my most cordial 
felicitations, and believe me, 

Ever faithfully yours, 
D. W. MoreHouse. 


CAMBRIDGE, Mass., April 7, 1gor. 
Dear Mr. Chadwick : 

It would be a great pleasure and satisfaction to Mrs. 
Janes and myself if we could participate in the celebration of 
the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Second Unitarian Society of 
Brooklyn, but it is a pleasure that we must forego. We shall 
nevertheless be with you in spirit, with grateful hearts for all 
that the pulpit teaching and friendly associations of the little 
chapel have meant to us. 

Better fifty years of Chadwick than acycle of obscurantism. 
If the present minister may not claim all the glory of these 
fifty years, he has grandly fulfilled the promise of Longfellow 
and Staples: there has been no break in the consistent sin- 
cerity of the pulpit teaching. 

All that we owe to this teaching can never be expressed 
in words. For nearly half of these fifty years the Second 

60 


Unitarian Society has been at once our university and our 
spiritual home; we look back to it as graduates to their Alma 
Mater. 

Greetings and congratulations, dear friends! The benefi- 
cent influences of your associated life are not limited to five 
decades, nor to a fraction of two centuries. They are your 
bequest to generations yet to be. 

Lewis G. JANEs. 


ROCHESTER, N. Y., il 9, : 
Dear John: Re ree 

Greeting from our Church Home to your Church Home 
and yourself in your festival hour! 

I think of your little church as a small, strong spring of 
very living water, whose brook has flowed far through our 
parish fields, and always as a quickening, enriching, 
brightening influence. We ministers all have often bent and 
borrowed from the stream—as we still do, and more than 
ever expect to. Few of our churches during these fifty rest- 
less years can show record of such continuous pulpit bene- 
faction as the names Longfellow, Staples, Chadwick suggest. 
I have seen Longfellow’s ‘‘No Good Thing is Failure, No 
Evil Thing Success” carved over the mantel of our livest 
church in the West; in his old Milwaukee meeting house have 
had Staples held up to me as type of a minister’s success; 
and for many years no Easter service has seemed quite ful- 
filled in its tenderness without Chadwick’s ‘‘ It Singeth Low.” 
Two of the three, because they had brothers born to them, 
are known almost as well by their first names as their last, 
and the other one, because he has made many brothers, has 
his ‘‘ John” just as securely homed in our hearts. May the 
people who have shared you all so widely with others, long 
know no other than their three—and Annie! 

Truly yours, 
W. C. GANNETT. 


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POSTSCRIPT. 


On Tuesday evening, April 16, the celebration of the anni- 
versary ended with a reception at No. 626 Carlton Avenue, 
Mr. Henry W. Maxwell, president of the Board of Trustees, 
joining in this with Mr. and Mrs. Chadwick. There was an 
overflowing company of happy friends, and the parlors were 
transfigured with the beauty of abundant flowers, roses and 
others coming by fifties in token of the fifty vanished years. 
Mrs. Vincent Coryell added a perfect grace to the occasion 
with her violin. It is impossible to individualize the thanks 
which are due to all those who contributed to the success of 
the celebration. But it seems only right to mention Mr. 
Maxwell’s carte blanche for the floral decoration of the church 
and for the printing of this publication. Our ‘‘ Thankoffer- 
ing,” amounting nearly to five hundred dollars, has replen- 
ished the Flower Fund and that of the Post Office Mission, 
and part of it will go upon such errands as Richard Henry 
Manning loved and did while he was our living friend, and 
in his honored name. The stenographic work of Mrs. Brock- 
way and Miss Sessions has been already mentioned as deserv- 
ing thanks and praise. Last, but not least, our organist and 
chorister, Mr. J. Lawrence Erb, with each member of the 
choir, might well receive some grateful recognition were it 
not that they are so vitally a part of the Society that thanks 
to them would be not only to but from themselves. 


‘‘That which becomes us, embosomed in beauty and 
wonder as we are, is cheerfulness and courage and the en- 
deavor to realize our aspirations. Shall not the heart which 
has received so much trust the Life by which it lives? May 
it not quit other leadings and listen to the Soul which has 
guided it so reverently and taught it so much, secure that 
the future will be worthy of the past?” 

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